USA TODAY International Edition
Tennessee’s Jones hurts own cause
Record, words not exactly endearing to Vols fans
DESTIN, FLA. Four years into his tenure at Tennessee, it’s still up for debate whether Butch Jones is a good enough football coach to win championships or a good personality fit in the highly scrutinized environment he signed up for.
His biggest problem is how often he wades into that debate himself.
Jones is a classic overexplainer, a point that was reinforced at the Southeastern Conference’s spring meetings when he made yet another comment that turned Volunteers- related Twitter into an inferno of disgust. Asked whether the Tennessee program was where Jones thought it would be by this point, he replied:
“Well, it’s a journey and it’s a process. You know, I’m very, very grateful to all of the players and the staff that have really brought Tennessee back. We still have so much to do. And it’s all about winning championships. But the first element that goes into winning championships is contending to win championships on a consistent basis. And our program has done that.
“But when you look, two days on the job ( in 2012) and having to have a perfect score of 1,000 or be the first college program to go on academic probation and all the sanctions that go along with that, and our players get 1,000 on the APR. You look at three straight bowl wins. There’s only three programs in the Southeastern Conference that have won nine games or more in the last two seasons, and Tennessee is one of them. We’re graduating our players. We’re putting our players in the National Football League.
“So I think the program is very, very strong. We talk about consistency in performance; we talk about sustained success. We’re having that right now, and there’s a lot of positive momentum and energy that really is geared toward that.”
On its face, nothing about that answer should offend the sensibilities of a fan base that is desperate to contend with Alabama or just win what has been a down SEC East. But, given that Jones is 14- 18 in the conference and coming off a season in which he blew a trip to the championship game by losing to South Carolina and Vanderbilt, it’s questionable at best whether Tennessee is actual- ly contending to win championships.
Combined with Jones’ muchmocked “Champions of Life” quote in December, it’s hard to blame Vols fans for thinking their coach is Pollyannaish at best and delusional at worst about his own record. And it has gotten to the point that every word out of his mouth is the subject of a forensic analysis among Tennessee fans.
Although he has been on the job for only a few months, new athletics director John Currie can quote all of the same statistics as his coach. The sliding Academic Progress Rate ( APR) score when Jones arrived. The dearth of NFL draft picks on the roster. The three consecutive winning sea- sons Jones has put together for the first time at Tennessee since 2002- 04.
It would be unfair, this early in his tenure, for Currie to diagnose the disconnect between the real progress Tennessee has made under Jones and the toxic assessment of him that swirls around the social media sphere, largely because Jones doesn’t always seem to grasp the massive expectations Tennessee fans have of him.
But for now anyway, Currie sees only positives.
“I’m excited to walk into an environment that we have with Coach Jones, and certainly his words and my words, everybody’s words at Tennessee, are parsed up pretty good because our fans are passionate about the University of Tennessee,” Currie told USA TODAY Sports. “He’s a smart coach and a good person, and he cares. What I believe is that when you have a coach who’s taken over a situation with all the things he took over and you march forward, you get better at all your stuff. It takes awhile in this environment to learn how to manage it, because so many people want to know stuff. He’s earned the right to say less because we’ve won a bunch of football games over the last four years.”
The problem is, Jones isn’t going to say less. He is afflicted with too much insecurity in a business in which you’re losing if you’re explaining, no matter how much you’re winning.
That’s why it was so damaging when Jones said Tennessee’s seniors were “Champions of Life” coming off a 9- 4 season that was, by pretty much every measure, a disappointment. Although Jones might have meant nothing more than to express pride in his players, it smacked of telling his fans how to feel. In college football, that never works.
This season is going to be a crucial — and potentially difficult — one for the relationship between Jones’ mouth and Tennessee fans’ Twitter accounts. The Volunteers have turned over a lot of talent, including at quarterback, and play at Florida and Alabama. Georgia’s recruiting resurgence under Kirby Smart doesn’t help. There could be one more backward step before the Vols are primed for another run at the East title.
It would probably be better for everyone if Tennessee fans chilled out on every inane slogan and prepackaged narrative Jones comes up with to justify his tenure, but that train might already be too far off the tracks. In the end, whether Jones can do the job at the level Tennessee expects will be abundantly clear — with or without the noise.