That Tennessee store in West Town mall used to have a lot of Davy Crockett shirts about 2-3 years ago. Don't know about now.
I reject the notion that Tennessee has any business in hiring a coach who is so largely still learning on the job, as they have in retaining him, and with equal hesitation. Which is zero.
I don't want to hire someone who is learning on the job. But if we already have somebody who has to learn on the job, my standards for keeping him (given that there are some costs associated with coaching changes) are mostly about whether he's learning successfully or not.
Would you want a surgeon, discovered to be unqualified during a procedure, to finish up? An incompetent accountant to remain, in the midst of an audit? The cost of competency is always and exponentially less than that of incompetence. Where else in your world would this logic apply? If you've made a mistake, the fastest way forward, is to go back, correct it, and to continue. By your own admission, and logic, it would be to simply continue, seemingly in the hopes that you could make enough subsequent mistakes as to happen upon the correct answer by equal parts "hope" and "luck". It's possible, I guess, but it's the most stupidly illogical thing I've read on this board in quite some time. It's stupid by VN standards, really.
It think it's pretty clear his stance is that if all we are going to do is hire someone else that is going to require the same learning curve as Butch, we might as well just stick with him and save ourselves some money.
Yep. And If there's no change in the positions above the HC, this is exactly what would happen, so might as well stick with him and accept mediocrity at the very best in your football program.
And it should be equally clear that I don't believe that we live in a world where those are the only two options. Because they aren't.
Your said it perfectly well. Why deviate? If the problem begins above and beyond Jones, then start there.
Not really deviating, just pounding the dead horse, hoping the right people hear it and are reading the posts on this board. We smart people in here.
I neither believe that we have the market cornered on honesty nor possess some gnostic-like knowledge that can't be found elsewhere. We just say it, often unflinchingly. But that doing so gives the site any notoriety - and it does - is less laudable of us, than it is a damnable indictment on our fan base, the media, etc., IMO. Simply, I think we speak with both reason and common sense, and don't understand why others don't often do the same, if ever.
This logic applies everywhere else in the world. There is a cost to firing someone and finding (possibly training) a new person to do a job. And, because there is a cost associated with making a change, the level of evidence against a person needed to fire them is higher than the level of evidence against needed to not hire them in the first place. That's actually pretty obvious stuff. Now determining that level of evidence may be non-trivial and may vary based on what job you're talking about. But knowing the cost of the buyout at UT, I want to see a coach that is successfully turning into a winner. I think we hired somebody who didn't know how to recruit in the SEC, but he figured it out pretty damn quick. I might've been reticent to hire someone who didn't know how to recruit in the SEC, but once we had him, as long as he's figuring it out that quickly, I'm cool with that. Same with winning. I don't think Jones brought in a staff that knows how to win in the SEC. But if he learns from that, makes appropriate changes, doesn't make the same mistake twice, and gets closer and closer to winning at the levels appropriate for Tennessee, then I'd rather keep him and build him into a championship coach than pay him $10 million to walk (with the one exception of a case where we have a known championship coach that we can reasonably expect to hire). And why not? If he's actually turning into a championship coach, wouldn't you want to be around when he gets there? Now I don't believe he is doing that, but if he were, even if I didn't like the hire, I'd have no problem with keeping him.
Depends on how close he's getting. Because he's figured out the recruiting part, you can give him four years to figure out the on-field part without hurting the program long-term. Importantly, this does require he give some indication that he's capable of figuring out the coaching part. If he's dropping a Dooley 2012 in year three, no reason to keep him another year.
Actually, I'm dissastlisied with my initial answer. It needs to be less specific in some ways and more in others. Here is the formula you use to determine whether you should fire someone, in pretty much any arena: Expected value of subsequent hire - expected value of current employee > cost of making a change. Make a change if and only if that is true. If the increased value of your subsequent hire is greater than the cost of making a change, make the change. Of course, to determine whether that's true, you need to have some idea of who you can realistically hire and how good they will be, some idea of how your current guy is going to perform in the future (main questions here: how is he performing now? is he trending up or down?), and an idea of the cost of a change (which includes both buyout and the cost to your product of transitioning from one hire to another)
This logic "works" if the metric with which we are concerned is strictly revenue. If you are happy with an 8 win ceiling and Neyland (mostly) selling out, by all means, Lyle is our guy.
Lot of gold stuff here, TV. So, you think that the evidence needed to fire Jones is insufficient and/or incomplete, right now, at this point? Based on what standards? List them, and highlight those which are unique to Jones, please, for easy reference. Butch Jones has had tremendous success in recruiting, but how is that unique to him? Hasn't every coach at Tennessee had phenomenal recruiting success, given not only our history but in spite of a complete lack of in-state talent, when compared to our peers? Of course, this is except for Dooley, who neither cared not was competent to recruit. From what does your willingness to wait on him to make those requisite staff changes, spring? Hope? Gut-feeling? Wishful thinking? What strikes you as positive proof that he believes that any staff changes are necessary, at all, or that he'll actually make them, or will succeed in accomplishing those critically important upgrades? Personally, I can't imagine how you think it even possible. This is the same man who arrived so delusionally arrogant as to think that his flunkie staff of has-beens and never-weres from Cincy were somehow suitable for the SEC - laughably calling them the Best Staff in America? So, he didn't possess the necessary foresight and/or faculties to differentiate between the disparate levels of play in the SEC and Conf-USA when he arrived, but he's magically going to acquire them, now? Perhaps he's evolving, you hope? Well, what's happened since being hired, seems a reasonably begged question. Luckily, he's made exactly one change on his staff since arriving, and he could not have more grotesquely bungled that one, had he tried to win a gold medal in the new Olympic sport of Bungling. The man literally hired an OC who was not only out of coaching, and for a number of years - but this after a completely unremarkable and short tenure in the NFL, and that on the heels of being ran out of Ann Arbor, before that. My god, you couldn't conceive of a worse hire, if you tried, could you? If so, what would have been worse than that, TV? Please tell me, because I'd love to hear how it could have been worse. And so, now I sincerely ask,, what thread-thin and completely imaginary reasons could you, or anyone, have to believe that this man may somehow turn into a "championship" caliber coach? Because the reality is this: now some 10+ years into our rocketing descent of increasing irrelevance, we are no longer in a position to "hope" and "pray" for the right guy, because the damage and cost of having "not the guy" exponentially grows with each passing day that he remains in place, and ultimately, dwarfs the comparitive pittance of something so simply solved with a $10M check. Simply, the problem isn't that we can't afford to let Butch go, but that we simply can't afford to keep him. And especially given both our current plight and the scant (read: zero) evidence to suggest that he has any conceivable hope to become that which you seem so willingly intent to wait upon, and while Rome burns. It is such a completely unreasonable position for such an otherwise reasonable person to take. So, I ask.
I'm assuming the people in charge are concerned with revenue, but I was intentionally non-specific about "value." If you're after wins, figure out how much wins are worth to you and plug it into the equation. It'll still work. It's also worth pointing out that wins and revenue are connected. It might take a while, but after the third or fourth consecutive 8-4 season, Neyland is going to stop selling out.
