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Phillip Fulmer could be Tennessee football coach in waiting
Where else but Tennessee would it be possible for Phillip Fulmer to regain the same coaching job from which he was fired 11 years ago?
www.tennessean.com
Tennessee is off to an 0-2 start with a pair of losses to non-Power 5 conference programs. That’s bad enough, but look what’s coming after Saturday’s game against Chattanooga.
The Vols will play four consecutive games against Florida, Georgia, Mississippi State and Alabama. A 1-6 start is a possibility.
You know what that means.
Former UT football coach and current athletics director Phillip Fulmer never has been so close to getting his old job back.
If I proposed my theory – and it’s only a theory – anywhere else, it would be deemed preposterous. But this is Tennessee, where history tells us when the going gets tough, the Vols get strange.
Where else but Tennessee would it be possible for Fulmer to regain the same coaching job from which he was fired 11 years ago? Fulmer’s ascent already has been remarkable.
The chronology: UT paid him millions of dollars to leave the premises. Former UT president Joe DiPietro created a special advisory job, which he filled with Fulmer. Former UT chancellor Beverly Davenport welcomed Fulmer's input on Tennessee’s search for a new head coach.
Fulmer then reviewed the playbook that first put him into the head-coaching business and put his former boss, Johnny Majors, out of the head-coaching business. Fulmer likely undercut AD John Currie, who was a ridiculously easy victim given his wayward coaching search in 2017, then sabotaged Currie’s Hail Mary attempt to hire Washington State coach Mike Leach.
And just like that, Currie was out and Fulmer was in as AD. The same man who put Tennessee football on its downward spiral then vowed to fix the football program.
His fix: Hire Alabama defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt, who has lost nine of his first 14 games as UT's coach.
At many SEC schools, an AD’s failed hiring of a football coach is grounds for termination. But not at UT, where so many folks live in a 1998 bubble. In that bubble, all they can see is Fulmer holding a national championship trophy above his head.
Now, let’s continue my football fantasy.
Fulmer won’t make his move until UT absorbs its annual drubbing from Alabama. Then, Tennessee will announce Pruitt has resigned because of (pick one) family, personal or health reasons. It can consult with Urban Meyer to make sure the wording is just right.
The Vols will throw millions of dollars at Pruitt to go away; he will begin looking for a defensive coordinator’s job somewhere else; and Fulmer will be named interim head coach. When the Vols win four of their last five games, Fulmer will be named full-time coach.
“I never expected to get back into coaching,” he will say. “But I’m doing this for UT, not me.”
Fans will peer through their 1998 bubble and wait for the next national championship.
And wait. And wait.
trying to hold it in!
Well I didn't!!
