The UT Athletic Director Fiasco — What We Should Be Asking
Since the news broke that former head football coach Phil Fulmer is being considered for the more-than-150-days-old athletic director vacancy, everyone at Tennessee has gone into full-fledged hysteria mode. My fellow O&W writer, Sam Hiatt, wrote a column asking why Fulmer would want to even consider taking the position, which you can read here, and my editor, Charlie Burris, composed a list of pros and cons involved in a Fulmer hire. You can read that here.
So I guess it’s up to me to be the odd girl out. As usual.
Sam has a legitimate question in his column: what if UT hires Fulmer and it doesn’t work out?
What I find interesting is why there isn’t a column on an equally legit question: what happens if a Blackburn hire doesn’t work out?
Same thing with Charlie’s list. Where are the pros and cons regarding a Blackburn hire?
The answer is fairly simple and easy to find. Agendas. We all have agendas — media, fans, and the administration at Tennessee. Nothing wrong with that. We’re human. We have preferences, and we write in support of those preferences even if it’s sometimes a little too heavily weighed on one side over the other. Make no mistake: the questions need to be asked. After all, it’s totally possible that if Fulmer is hired, he could fail.
But it is equally possible that if Blackburn is hired, he could fail as well.
The fact of the matter is, either man would be a good hire, and both men would be handicapped by the University of Tennessee administration. In the process, you might want to think about another agenda.
The university’s agenda.
When evaluating Fulmer and Blackburn, both candidates bring assets to the table UT absolutely needs. First and foremost, a Tennessee Volunteer heading up the Tennessee Volunteers. There’s no downside here. None.
If Fulmer takes the job, we have a true VFL in the AD office. Bar none. And let’s be honest — there’s a huge precedence for football coaches becoming athletic directors, including the only other Tennessee football coach to win a national championship, General Robert Neyland.
And that little guy down at Bama too. No, not Bill Battle (although he was a Tennessee football coach too), but Bear Bryant. In fact, the Bear was the AD at two schools — Alabama and Texas A&M. More recently, Tom Osborne at Nebraska and Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin came back to the schools as AD after leaving as the head football coach some years before. So, what are the advantages to hiring Fulmer? Unquestioned loyalty to the university, a thorough comprehension of what it takes to build up championship programs in multiple sports, and the absolute home run addition of Fulmer’s name and presence to recruiting and hiring.
If Blackburn gets the job, we have a Tennessee Volunteer heading up the Tennessee Volunteers. There’s no downside here either.
Blackburn’s background in fundraising, academic oversight, and his input on new facilities (like the football training center) is invaluable. This is another downright loyal man for the past two and a half decades, who’s done brilliant things down in Chattanooga as the athletic director there.
Blackburn, as a matter of fact, began his tenure at the University of Tennessee as a football coach where he was trained by — guess who? — Phillip Fulmer. In fact he worked with Fulmer directly for a decade. A decade that was the most successful run in UT athletics history, by the way, and ended with Blackburn as the assistant athletic director for football operations. In fact, both men were integral in developing and building a national championship-winning football program. Both Fulmer and Blackburn are winners.
So ask yourselves, Vol Nation — what seems to be the trouble here? Why are you worrying about what happens if Fulmer’s hired and he fails? Why aren’t you asking the real questions that need to be asked here? Such as…
Why hasn’t an athletic director already been hired?
Why is UT now floating Fulmer’s name for AD when fans have been waiting for months to hear that Dave Blackburn was hired? Why hasn’t Blackburn even been contacted by the university about the job?
At this point, I don’t give two rat tails about who is hired as AD. As I said, either Fulmer or Blackburn will be a huge step up from what we have now. But this hire should have been made months ago. We are exactly two weeks away from National Signing Day, and UT still doesn’t have an athletic director.
That’s flat out embarrassing.
Throw all the gossip and rumors out the door, Tennessee fans. The real issue here isn’t who’s going to be hired. The real issue is why in the heck is he not hired yet? What is the cause of the inexcusable delay in filling this position?
In other words, what is the university’s agenda in this escalating disaster?
We needed a butt in the AD chair four months ago, not April or May. And with reports now surfacing that Blackburn hasn’t even been contacted by the university, I have to wonder why, exactly, that is. If Fulmer was their guy all along, why the delay? He’s already there in Knoxville; it’s not like they’d have to look far to find him.
How difficult would it have been for the university to not announce Dave Hart’s resignation immediately? They could have then quietly interviewed Fulmer and Blackburn, who must be the top two candidates for the position, and selected a new AD before Hart officially resigned? Then they could have announced both the resignation and the hire at the same time.
For example, Alabama AD Bill Battle retired on Monday of this week, and the hiring of his replacement Greg Byrne, formerly the athletic director at the University of Arizona, was announced the same day. If Alabama has the brains to figure this out, it can’t be that hard, right?
But UT’s waited for over five months.
That being said, there’s an advantage for the administration putting Fulmer’s name out as a candidate too, one that has nothing to do with hiring him: stirring up past controversies and exploiting a perceived divide in the UT fan base. That shifts the focus of fans and the media from the university’s failures on the administrative level to long-running arguments that diffuse and distract from the real issues. The revelation that Fulmer was being considered as a serious candidate fired the media up within minutes, and social media right after. Neither has settled down since, and that’s an advantage for people at Tennessee who don’t want the focus of this search shifted onto them.
An agenda, launched by people who are more concerned about keeping their jobs than filling the vacancy in another.
Because make no mistake, the administration at the University of Tennessee has been an unmitigated disaster since Mike Hamilton’s tenure went up in flames in 2011. This ongoing public relations nightmare is wholly of their own making, and yet another example of how ridiculously overwhelmed and unprepared they are to make any decision regarding the athletic department. They’re terrified they’ll make a mistake, and so start floating names out there to see if there’s one they can grab onto in the hopes that they’ll survive the flood of outrage.
They’ve done that a few times before, which resulted in some really “exciting” hires they were “confident” about. Lane Kiffin. Derek Dooley. Donnie Tyndall.
Exactly. Just stop and think about what you should really be mad about. Because if we’re not careful, the UT administration will hire an athletic director who once in the 1980’s was the assistant coach for a high school badminton team that placed seventh in the state tourney in Rhode Island just to put a non-controversial (read: someone nobody knows about) name on the letterhead. They’ll sell it as a “new direction” for UT sports.
Then they’ll spend four or five years watching everything burn to the ground.
Again.
Don’t let them get away with it this time around. Just pray that the administration doesn’t start throwing other names out. Because if that happens, UT athletics as we know them are probably doomed…and it won’t matter whose name is on the athletic director’s office door.
