I had no real thoughts on Kiffin at the time. He thrilled me early with his brash attitude and his recruiting prowess. But I quickly became weary of his lame approach. He lost me completely with the gas-pumping comment. There's no doubt Kiffin was a good game day coach at Tennessee. There's also no doubt that he was good at getting highly-rated recruits to sign on the dotted line. (It's hard to call him a good recruiter, since the guys he pursued ultimately didn't pan out.) In hindsight, though, the bottom line is that Kiffin just was not a fit for Tennessee. Not culturally, not geographically, and not in any other manner. That has to be a part of it. Coaches have to "fit" their programs. That's a big part of why Kiffin ultimately jumped the first ship that sailed by the harbor, but it's also a big part of why he managed to alienate former players and a lot of other people around the program, because UT's tradition meant squat to him. It was a terrible hire by Hamilton. And, again, hindsight is a powerful tool to have, but it's hard to imagine that UT couldn't have made a better hire at that time. Despite two losing seasons in four years, Tennessee was still Tennessee.
The Kiffin train wreck likely would have made it impossible to hire a good coach the next year, but Hamilton managed to go even further when he hired Dooley. I liked Dooley because he said all the right things at his press conference. He had all the makings of a southern "gentleman," with good football pedigree and a rich tradition in SEC football. Plus he was not David Cutcliffe, who it had appeared just a couple of days earlier that UT was going to hire . . . a hire that I was opposed to (probably for all the wrong reasons). But the Dooley hire was a tremendous leap of faith for Hamilton. This is a guy who had a losing record at a mid-major. It was akin to Auburn's hire of Gene Chizik...that led to a national championship for Auburn, but only because he surrounded himself with the right people (namely, Gus Malzahn). Dooley lacked the competence to hire a staff that could cover up his shortcomings. He further deteriorated UT's already fragile relationship with high school coaches in the region, continued to alienate the football alumni, and his complete inability to recruit set the program back several seasons.
Hamilton was a numbers guy. That's what he was known for — improving the AD's bottom line. Much of that was due to his ability to fund-raise, but it was also partially due to his ability to manage budgets. I sincerely think that Hamilton hit a home run with the hire of Bruce Pearl and convinced himself that he could do the same thing in football...so he went after two bargain basement hires and struck out swinging on both of them. THAT is what set this program back...not the firing of Fulmer. I love Coach Fulmer and what he meant to Tennessee football for so many years, but if anything, the fact that he held on until the bitter end in '08 set the program back more than if he had retired in '07 or '05. Going through the doldrums of a transition was inevitable. Remember, many fans warned that UT might need a hire or two to get it right. It had happened to the SEC's biggest heavyweights over the preceding two decades. Sometimes a change results in temporary setback, even if it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do, but an incompetent athletics director was the biggest reason why we're still struggling to recover from that change.
Hammy screwed up the firing of Fulmer as well ...
