Good news for many Tennessee fans: Butch Jones is no longer your head coach! Potentially not so good news for those same Tennessee fans: Brady Hoke is your temporary head coach!
Brady Hoke is BACK as a head coach once more, taking over Tennessee in interim capacity
Hoke gets a second crack at a big job, if only for a few weeks.
Calvin Mattheis-USA TODAY Sports
The former Michigan man and head coach will take over in Knoxville. Hoke was notably Michigan’s head coach for four increasingly disastrous years. He got the Wolverines to a Sugar Bowl victory, but also to a 5-7 season by the time it was over.
From there, Hoke spent a year out of a football before spending last season as Oregon’s defensive coordinator. Oregon’s defense did not become good.
Photo by Steve Dykes/Getty Images
Hoke being added to 2017’s Tennessee staff was actually a bit of a stroke of luck. It’s always good to have a former head coach on staff, but Jones obviously didn’t add Hoke with the overriding thought that he’d be replaced by his assistant head coach so soon.
Before arriving at Ball State as head coach in 2003, Hoke spent nearly the entirety of two decades as a defensive line coach in multiple stops. Despite all his issues as head coach at Michigan, he did have two top-10 recruiting classes roll through Ann Arbor during his tenure. The talent he left in the cupboard is evidenced clearly by the school’s NFL draft production under Jim Harbaugh.
This all also creates a wildly impossible but hilarious scenario for the rest of the season.
There is a greater than .00000000000000001 percent chance that this happens, and it’s now all I’m rooting for.
More realistically, Hoke is the guy who gets the team to the stadium on time for its last two games while the administration deals with the fourth round of Jon Gruden rumors in the past decade.
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