Did Phil Fulmer Use ETSU?

Marky Billson
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

By turning down the Bucs’ head football coaching job but eventually accepting Tennessee’s athletic director position, Fulmer‘s actions speak of a feeling of being too good for ETSU.

Marky Billson, host of Tri-Cities Sports NOW

Let’s say after a long marriage your significant other told you they no longer wanted to be with you.

It’s painful, but you adapt. Over the years you find comfort in another suitor who is crazy about you, but comes from a lower-class background than you are. You politely decline their advances, then hook that suitor up with a friend of yours for a short period of time.

And then, when your former significant other, showing the signs of age and hard knocks, asks to have you back, you give your former significant other two words.

“Thank God!”

You’d have used that significant other. You’ve basically patronized them.

And that’s precisely what Phil Fulmer did to East Tennessee State.

Upon football’s upstart in Johnson City, Fulmer was offered the job as head coach of the Buccaneers. He turned it down, and then recommended Carl Torbush, just two years younger than Fulmer, to ETSU.

Phil Fulmer was a consultant during the revival of ETSU football.

Fulmer could not have known at the time he would eventually become the athletic director at Tennessee. He was out of coaching and frankly at the time the ETSU job would have to appear to be the best shot at reviving his career in athletics.

True, ETSU would not have been able to pay him the salary he was accustomed to. But that happens to practically every coach who has ever been fired.

How would Fulmer have fared as ETSU’s coach? Who knows? He would have brought name recognition and certainly would have been welcomed in to any high school in the state. Dr. Richard Sander, the ETSU athletic director who hired Fulmer as a consultant to guide the Bucs’ football revival, has even publicly recommended Fulmer for the chancellorship of the University of Tennessee.

Then again, what coach from ETSU WOULDN’T be welcomed to any high school in the state? And paying someone less than they think they are worth is hardly a recipe for success.

There’s just the feeling that ETSU gave Fulmer the opportunity to get back into athletics; to be in a position where he could become the athletic director at Tennessee.

And all ETSU gets out of it is a likely drubbing and the reputation of being a bunch of S.O.B.s; the Same Old Bucs.

Marky Billson hosts Tri-Cities Sports NOW 12–2 p.m. ET weekdays on 1420 NBC Sports Radio Tri-Cities. Clink the link or watch him live or archived here and here.

Marky Billson
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