Earlier this week USA Today’s Bob Nightengale set off a media firestorm when he said that it “wouldn’t surprise a soul” if San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello returns to college baseball.

“The Giants took an unprecedented gamble when they hired Vitello from the University of Tennessee, and it has badly backfired,” wrote Nightengale. “It certainly hasn’t helped that the Giants surrounded him with a huge contingent of young and inexperienced coaches, but they are the biggest mess outside Queens.

“They’ve embarrassed themselves with their performance, leaving them no choice but to place every veteran on the trade block but starter Logan Webb. It might be too embarrassing to fire Vitello after one year, but it wouldn’t surprise a soul to see Vitello return to the college ranks if the right opening comes his way.”

Vitello, who led the Tennessee Vols to a national championship in 2024, is off to a rough start in his first season as the manager of the Giants. And since this experiment — Vitello is the first college coach to go directly into a manager’s role without previous pro baseball experience — was always a risk, it’s no surprise that speculation about when he’ll return to college is picking up.

Would Tennessee be a possibility for Tony Vitello in 2027?

Nightengale mentions that the right job would need to come open for this to happen.

There aren’t any current openings, and there aren’t expected to be any openings — unless something unexpected happens — before the start of the 2027 college baseball season.

Some fans, however, have wondered out loud if Vitello could simply return to Tennessee after the 2026 MLB season.

I get why fans would ask that, but I don’t think that’s a plausible scenario. You never say never, but I’d be shocked if Vitello was the coach at Tennessee in 2027.

For starters, Josh Elander, the longtime Vitello assistant who took over as Tennessee’s head coach last fall, had a solid debut season. The Vols made the NCAA Tournament, and he’s put together a great recruiting/transfer class. Maybe the conversation would be different if Elander had been a total disaster in his first season, but he wasn’t. Far from it, in fact. Elander showed a willingness to evolve throughout the season and I thought the team responded well to him.

The biggest reason, though, that I don’t think this would be a realistic scenario is because I don’t think Vitello and Vols athletic director Danny White will ever work together again.

It’s been well documented that Vitello and White weren’t exactly besties.

“I think for Tennessee fans, they were always hopeful that Tony would stay,” said On3’s Chris Low last year. “But being in the major leagues, that’s quite an opportunity for a college coach to get that type of opportunity and really be a pioneer. And I think over the last couple years, if you’re inside and sort of know what’s going on, this probably wasn’t just a complete surprise to a lot of people — certainly [people] close to the program — that there had not been what I would call the best relationships between Tony and Danny White, the Tennessee AD. And I think when you combine all of it — I don’t think it was just one thing — but when you combine all of it, what happened yesterday, happened.

“I think as people sort of think back through (the Vitello era), it now, and what it was like, there’s a lot of sadness,” continued Low. “I know, Danny White said it was a proud day. I disagree. It was a sad day, because I don’t think this had to happen. I think there was a way for this not to happen, and it happened. I think that’s what people are most upset, sad, and angry [about] — all the different emotions. That you had a real gem, you had a treasure. And Tony wasn’t perfect. Maybe the way he did things and handled things in the last few years wasn’t perfect. None of us are. But he clearly was something that, when you look at Tennessee athletics, and yeah, [baseball] didn’t make money, and yeah, they lost money, but he was something, again, that Tennessee people had to hold on to and say, ‘He’s ours. He makes us proud.’ And guess what, there’s not a lot of people walking around over there with a natty ring.”

There was also a report that White saw Vitello as an “irritant.”

Vitello tried to downplay the rift between the two, but he wasn’t very convincing.

“I mean, that part’s crazy,” said Vitello last November. “Because Danny is the athletic director, and I’m the baseball coach. We’re not drinking [buddies] — we’re not meeting on Broadway and going to see different shows.

“The communication that I had going on was heavily trying to figure out where exactly the San Francisco Giants were coming from. And there’s kind of a pecking order — a system that’s set up on campus. And our strength coach is pretty close with one of the administrators, and he was somebody that was was good to talk about with some things, in particular, the future of the program once things pushed forward.”

I don’t know what the future holds for Vitello. I don’t think he knows right now, either. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing Tony V back on Rocky Top as the head coach — at least not in the near future.