The wild Tennessee football coaching search that took 25 days to complete and led to the firing of the Vols’ athletic director was even weirder than we thought, new documents have revealed. One of the oddest nuggets to emerge so far: It looks like Alabama tried to help.
Alabama apparently tried to help Tennessee’s now-fired AD at the start of his disastrous coaching search
The Tide sent along their own evaluation of some coaches. Why?
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Rocky Top Insider reports that a Tide administrator sent what looks like a sort of head coach power ranking to then-Tennessee AD John Currie. Here’s what he wrote on Nov. 13, one day after Tennessee fired Butch Jones and got started with its search:
Hello John,
My name is Kyle Vasey and I am an assistant AD for strategic planning at Alabama. Greg Byrne asked me to send you some analysis we performed on head coaches recently. You’ll find an excel spreadsheet which ranks head coaches based on a metric we created called: coaching efficiency. This metric is a weighted score which incorporates various factors such as national championships, final AP ranking, overall win percentage, etc. You’ll also find a pdf file which analyzes coaches based on their previous coaching experience: Power 5 Head Coach, Power 5 Assistant Coach, former NFL head coach, etc
I am happy to answer any questions you might have on the data.
Thanks,
Kyle Vasey
It looks real. Vasey is listed in the Tide’s athletic directory. It’s not clear that Currie responded in any way or even read the Tide’s data.
After a failed attempt to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano and near brushes with Washington State’s Mike Leach and NC State’s Dave Doeren, Tennessee fired Currie and replaced him with former coach Phillip Fulmer. The Vols’ new AD ultimately hired a guy from Alabama’s coaching staff, defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt.
So, Alabama’s AD had an assistant send the Vols some coach analysis.
According to Rocky Top Insider, what Bama sent was a collection of “efficiency ratings” of 87 head coaching stints at Power 5 schools since the turn of the millennium. The ratings used a weighting system that tied 40 percent of a rating to national championship seasons (sounds a bit biased toward, Bama, huh?), 30 percent to AP Poll top-10 finishes, 20 percent to winning percentage, and 10 percent to “recency factor,” or five-year success.
The top five: Nick Saban at Bama, Urban Meyer at Ohio State, Pete Carroll at USC, Jim Tressel at Ohio State, and Meyer at Florida. That seems about right. A lot of people would’ve reached roughly the same conclusion without doing any number-crunching.
The obvious question: Why would Alabama do this?
A few possibilities jump to mind:
- Maybe Byrne, the Alabama AD, was just being a nice guy. People in the same professional field can give each other genuine advice sometimes, even if they’re competitors.
- Maybe Alabama was hoping the information in its ratings would steer the Vols toward a candidate who wasn’t on the Tide coaching staff.
- Maybe Alabama thought it was embarrassing for the SEC that Tennessee was so bad. The Tide play a crossover game every year, and maybe Saban was tired of the easy competition.
Tennessee did just fine to land Pruitt in the end. It was quite a trip to get there.
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