Fugate Gone

Ftr, I liked Kiffin and wished that he had stayed here.

 

Some of those guys were Fulmer's. Brown is hard to blame on Kiffin. King was more injuries than lack of talent. Teague should have stayed at WR.

 

I think Chaney was fine as the quality control guy he was in 2009. He'd served well in that type of role at Purdue. He just sucks at calling plays.

 

You can count on almost one hand how many players actually committed/signed with Kiffin in '09 and '10, that have made or did make any real difference on our UT Football team. Now, I understand that it had more to do with Dooley's inability to hire people to coach them up, and his overall dumbassery as a coach and administrator, but some of the guys Kiffin brought in just weren't college material in terms of maturity and intelligence. See the Pilot caper as an prime example.

 

Also, the 2008 class was at least as bad, if not worse, yet for some reason the guy that spent 2 months recruiting the 2009 class is assigned all the blame for its failures.

 

Because he signed them and then left. I don't blame him for taking the SC job, but it still left us ****ed.

 

What coach in their right mind wouldn't take Bryce Brown, Janzen Jackson, Darren Myles or Nuke Richardson? Obviously hindsight is 20/20 but at the time these guys were being recruited everyone was excited to get them and now some of these same fans use it against Kiffin as some sort of proof that he was a failure. I noticed this being brought up at toos a few times but people always fail to mention some of the guys that would have been in that signing class had Kiffin stayed.

 

Hiring Dooley is what ****ed us, even Butch Jones hasn't had any issues recruiting after the shit show last season so I doubt Sumlin would have had any trouble either.

 

Yes, that ****ed us even more. Double penny.

 

Meh. Left us Bray and pretty much delivered Da'Rick and Hunter. Also gave us a good chunk of our OL, our TE, and an NFL caliber running back. Think how good our offense could have been had Dooley kissed Bryce Brown's ass a bit and not kisses Da'Rick's so much? Couple that with not hiring the worst DC in the country and we are looking at a lot more wins the last two years.

 

He didn't give us our TE and only two of our starting OL.

 

Rivera was another guy Kiffin had on the way prior to Dooley.

 

First time I've ever heard that. Not saying I don't believe you.

 

I remember hearing about him prior to Dooley. Looks like Dooley gave him his formal offer, though. I guess DD gets the credit for that one. Probably would have ****ed it up if he'd had more than a couple of weeks to recruit him, though.

 

It's almost like Kiffin is a cult hero. Maybe Butch will give him an OC job when he's looking in a year or two.

 

The kiffin love is ridiculous. They played 2 good games. Won one and lost the other. His recruiting class ended up being a pos and will rank as a top 3 recruiting class bust of all time pretty soon.
Though if you want a habitual liar as a coach, who just took a #1 preseason team in an avg conference straight out of the top 25 at year's end, I guess he is someone that should keep getting ballcupped by UT fans. He did so much for the program and to help stabilize, we should be thankful he came and left us worse than when he got here, which led to even further depths with Dooley.

 

Probably the two best games we've seen the last decade or so.

 

Well. You look at the path we were on the four years before he was hired. Then look at where we were in 2009. Before the bottom really fell out at the end of the season we looked as good as anyone in the conference. At the same time we have a top 5-ish class assembled with a ton of star power left to round out the open spots. The future looked bright as hell. Then look at what happened from 2010-2012. There was one deviation on the one way trip to hell we've been on. It was caused by the Lane Train. And when you see immediate improvement from Butch like this, it's hard to say that all of our problems the last decade weren't the result of a has-been and a never-will-be.

 

The '09 class is historically bad, but blame should go all around. Fulmer, Dooley, and Kiffin.

 

You're right. We had one season to judge him on at UT totally fair to write him off. Waiting and seeing how did at UT would be totally idiotic.