Blackburn Is Not the Guy

Yes.

 

Shouldn't Blackburn get credit for his job at UTC? If a bad hire was made my Mike Hamilton than a bad hire was made by Mike Hamilton, not David Blackburn.

 

And from what I understand he was dead against the Dooley hire.

That is all I need to know.

 

How many of you guys read that all start to finish?

 

Well, I'm out, too, and I'm going on record as being against Droski.

 

I think that these are actually entirely fair points. I would respectfully, and with complete sincerity, offer:

1. The best, easiest, least disruptive and certainly cheapest way to fix a terrible hire is simple: prevent it. But, as fortune-telling isn't any more statistically reliable than "blind hope" and "wishful thought", and no predictive method can be infallible, this is no easy thing to do. All that you can really do, or hope to control, is the level of honest and objective scrutiny that is consistently applied, thereby allowing at least the opportunity to form a more fully informed opinion. While you'are still operating on some degree of faith, no matter what possible and un/likely conclusions you reach, or directions any subsequent decision(s) may take, it is at least more sure-footed with scrutiny, than without. And my ultimate aim here, in a nutshell, is simply to introduce some necessarily honest scrutiny of the seemingly automatic and unanimous sentiment that Blackburn should be our next AD. I would argue that the more genuinely difficult and uncomfortable - unfair, even - the scrutiny feels, the more it was necessary.

2. Tennessee has had a spate of disastrous hires and dozens upon dozens of lesser, but cumulatively significant, missteps, mistakes, mismanagement and just plain old shitty decision-making, from the top on down. Notably, at least to anyone paying attention, our largest and most damaging wounds are almost exclusively self-inflicted. Worse, we seem to have a particularly unique ability to cure / solve / correct a found mistake by simply making other, new and additional mistakes, oftentimes far worse than the first mistake which we initially made, and had vainly hoped to correct. Given this, surely neither we nor Tennessee would be anything less than infinitely better off had we exercised greater and more rigid scrutiny during those times, and not less.

3. Given what you know now, imagine how things may have been different, had the fan base more closely, persistently and earnestly scrutinized the decisions of our leaderrship, as they occurred, instead of well after the fact, when the damage has been done, and the strait-lines of accountability not been so irrevocably blurred with time, and buried beneath mountains of so many subsequent and layering shit-storms. What might fans have done differently to even attempt to prevent Hamilton's hire, had they even had a glimmer of what he would do, and now only fully known in hindsight? What about to prevent Dooley's hiring - what would most TN fans not have done to prevent his hiring, or to at least have given the decision-makers even a wisp of pause for fear of any legitimate blowback which it would have undoubtedly unleashed? Honestly, did anyone really think that hiring the rookie LATech coach and Bama burnout was going to work out well for us, especially considering the (stupidly) self-imposed 96-hour deadline, in a most desperate time of the year only weeks from signing day? Did anyone really need to see it all implode in Lexington two years later? Did you need to slowly watch him crumble in Year 3, as our program did the same, to see where that was the likely result? Did you need to know anything more about the complete ineptitude of Hart, who kept him beyond that plane ride back to Knoxville? Were we still foolish to believe, however cautiously and tenuously held, that this same guy would then.- could then - hire his competent replacement? Do you see how abjectively stupid that notion seems right now, how offensive the thought is to any reasonable person, to suggest that such was even or could be in any way possible?

Well, a great many of the exact same people who now clamor for Blackburn's coronation also wanted Hamilton, Hart, Buzz, Raleigh, Cheek, Cuonzo, Tyndall, Dooley, Warwick and Butch F'ing Jones, who failed to denounce them at first glance, or were completely unconcerned that our fan base was in any way sufficient informed and thoughtful enough of the ineptitude of their leadership as to give them either preemptive pause or post-reactive shame.

I'm just some stupid-assed nobody on a dumb message board, fighting as an amoeba on the back of a blind and mentally retarded humpback whale. But even in this one little protected ecosphere of cosmically insignificant unimportance floating amidst an electronic ocean of opinion, I just can't just sit idly and watch them stupidly continue to shovel dirt onto themselves, the University, the athletic programs, me, you and everyone else who truly - really, actually, tangibly and thoroughly - loves Tennessee, and greatly desires it's best and in all things. I accept the futility of it all, I really honest-to-God do, but I'll just quit and die before willfully succumbing and resigning myself to it, or failing to oppose and resist it, as best as I possibly can, and in every manner conceivably possible.

I ain't motivated by hate, Brutha. Not me.

We have to stop waiting on the leadership and boosters to just magically figure things out, to admit their own glaring deficiencies, and to collectively decide to self-impose their own, necessary and long overdue corrections in righting this ship. The soldiers are going to have to win the war by saving the Generals from themselves. It's just the truth. And maybe Blackburn can be a big help in that direction or not, but even if he is named (and I'd say 95% chance he is) as AD, a fawningly wide-eyed fan base who falls all over themselves is not the introduction that he needs, or which will best suit our demands that he work to singularly produce excellence in every aspect involved with the University of Tennessee. There is real, important and urgent work to be done here, which is already a dozen long years past due, and which should not - cannot - be left unchecked for another day, much less another year. If he's hired, he better hit the ground running, with purpose and fire and get to fixing shit from Day 1 and every day thereafter, and to know that he can GTFO if he fails to do so, or even needlessly delays it. I think it's entirely fair to question if he's the right man for the job, and to scrutinize areas of legitimate concern, before he's hired, believing it both better and more productive to do so now and on the front end, than later, when suffering with it. That's the entirety of my point.

 

Damn, Leo Tolstoy... If not Blackburn, who is familiar with how shit gets done at UT isn't the guy, who would you be in favor of hiring? Just being against shit is easy, anybody can naysay and nitpick but who would (in your opinion) come in and TCOB in a way that returns and elevates Trnnessee's athletic fortunes?

 

No earthly idea. In general, I'm for the absolute best person for the job, and that's usually the one with the largest and most consistent record of proven success at the highest level.

 

When was the last time UT made a good hire? Honest question. Majors was an alum and Fulmer was a hire from within the program so do those even count? When is the last time UT hired someone from the outside that wasn't shit? Woodruff? Dickey?

 

Dickey. Dickey would have won a shit ton of games here had he not left for Florida, imho.

 

Pearl was a good hire even though it ended badly

 

So, Bill Battle? The ghost of Mal Moore? Radakovic(?) maybe? It sounds like you'd rather have one of the AD's from a P5 school than Blackburn and I can see wisdom in that but the truck is finding one with all the accolades and success who is actually willing to come here from whatever already successful program they're currently running....

 

We had Cutcliffe all but locked up and pissed that away too, amirite? That could have been a great hire.

 

What about Peyton. Would he ever consider a headache like that? I know it is a dumb question, but I would love to see him get involved as the AD, some kind of coach, or mega booster behind the scenes. Come home, favorite son, come home.

 

If you dont mind a grown man wearing a wiretap to ruin an 18 year olds's basketball career.

 

Just talking about results

 

I don't see him as the administrative type. Put him on a Board somewhere or let him be a free motivational resource. But, I do not see him as a HC or an AD. He may very well be more effective on the outside with clean hands. If he does that and is vocal, that would carry a lot of weight with the fanbase.

 

His deflection of all the heat that was headed our way, and his subsequent body of work at UTC is all the reason I need, tbh. The stuff about Fulmer and being assigned to Kiffin is just noise to me, because he's raised the level of every major sport at UTC to a championship level. Women's BB was already there but got to national relevance, Men's BB had been decent but lucked into its last championship. And Football was literally the Kansas of FCS. I can't explain to you how apathetic people used to be around here. My middle school fb team used to get box seats all the time, and we could run around the stadium like it was ours almost. The only time you'd ever see it full was for the national championship.

 

Same could be said about Kiffin. Seriously.