How Phil Fulmer Sabotaged ETSU Football (Or Why Even Vols Fans Should Pull For the Bucs Saturday)
I always loved how Bullwinkle episodes had two titles . . .

What makes this Saturday’s Tennessee-ETSU game so painful for Buccaneers fans is that if there was ever a time where a FCS team could defeat the Volunteers, this is it.
A victory against the Vols could elevate ETSU to new heights.
The Bucs would be looked at as the equal, not the subservient, to the Vols.
With that, Tri-Citians could stop thinking of themselves as less than Knoxville, which no other metropolitan area in the world does, and allow itself to grow culturally if not quantitatively.
Meanwhile, ETSU could pursue a gridiron rise, as, say, Appalachian State did after they defeated Michigan.
Good Southern Conference teams have shown in this decade they can beat bad Southeastern Conference teams.
Unfortunately ETSU is not a good Southern Conference team. And the reason for that can be attributed to the man now in charge of the Tennessee athletic program, Phil Fulmer.
Fulmer was hired as a consultant to ETSU when the Bucs resurrected their football program. Unfortunately, after Fulmer said he was not interested in coaching ETSU, he presented Carl Torbush to be the resurrected Bucs’ first football coach.

Torbush came with good references. He is a man of strong character. He’s probably just the sort of person you hope will move next door.
Unfortunately the hire of Torbush spoke of hiring someone from Fulmer’s 1998 prime, when Torbush was the head coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels. Upon his hire in 2013, Torbush was the linebackers coach at an FCS school.
Sixty-something coach hired sixty-something coach.
The result was catastrophic. At home, against another first year program, ETSU lost 56–16 in their debut. It didn’t get much better with 11 victories and 22 losses during the Torbush tenure.
Torbush refused to bring in Junior College transfers, relying totally on his initial recruiting class to develop. That’s an incredible leap of faith he should have been called out on immediately.
He spoke of the Southern Conference being the best conference in FCS when even the SoCon’s commissioner said on my 1420 NBC Sports Radio Tri-Cities’ radio show, Tri-Cities Sports NOW, it wasn’t. He killed the tradition of ETSU coming out for games to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells,” finding the four decades old hard rock classic to be “objectionable.”
That’s not the way to relate to 18-year-olds.
The best move Torbush ever made was suspending a starter who had stiffed a cab driver. Such an act will prevent further off-field misdeeds. Besides, the Bucs won a big game the next day.
Unfortunately, the state of ETSU football was the difference between starter and reserve at the starter’s position was negligible.
That’s what Randy Sanders inherits. That’s the foundation Fulmer laid for ETSU with his coaching hire.
Tennessee fans seem to be happy with the hire of Fulmer as athletic director. After all, he is a memory of their glory days.
Unfortunately, his track record isn’t good when it comes to hiring football coaches, and the fact all of the big name head coaches the Vols were said to be pursuing for their football coaching job prior to Fulmer’s hire (Mike Leach, Les Miles) were no longer candidates and a coordinator with no head coaching experience at any level was hired is telling.
So if ETSU loses, and the analytics say there’s a 98.5 percent chance they will, it will be the most brilliant thing Fulmer ever does as athletic director. He will actually have sabotaged an opponent his team is going to play.
The flip side to this is that if ETSU wins, then obviously I’m wrong on the above. Torbush then will have left new head coach Randy Sanders a sleeping giant. Fulmer will have actually hired a coach that left the pieces in place to beat an SEC program, struggling as they may be. He will be a brilliant selector of coaches!
Ironic, isn’t it? The best indication Fulmer will be a good athletic director is that Tennessee actually loses to an FCS team this Saturday.
But then the fans will clamor for Fulmer to hire Sanders as Vols head coach.
A Catch-22 if there ever was one.
Marky Billson hosts Tri-Cities Sports NOW on 1420 NBC Sports Radio Tri-Cities 12–2 p.m. ET weekdays. Listen to his show via link or watch live or archived here and here.
