'We had nailed it pretty good' – Butch Jones is still making excuses about why he was fired by the Tennessee Vols in 2017
This won't come as a surprise to SEC football fans, but Butch Jones is still making excuses for why he was fired by the Tennessee Vols nearly eight years ago. Jones, who is currently the head coach at Arkansas State, recently appeared on the Coaches & The Mouth podcast and he was asked about his […]
This won't come as a surprise to SEC football fans, but Butch Jones is still making excuses for why he was fired by the Tennessee Vols nearly eight years ago.
Jones, who is currently the head coach at Arkansas State, recently appeared on the Coaches & The Mouth podcast and he was asked about his time as the head coach of the Volunteers.
Tennessee hired Jones in late 2012 and while he had some modest success on Rocky Top, the program mostly underachieved during the Butch era.
The Vols, for example, had elite rosters in 2015 and 2016, but the program was unable to win more than nine games in either season. 2016 was particularly tough for Tennessee fans as the Vols inexplicably lost late-season games to South Carolina and Vanderbilt, which robbed UT of a trip to the Sugar Bowl (and a shot at winning the SEC East).
Jones was fired in 2017 after going 4-6 in Tennessee's first 10 games of the season.
"At the University of Tennessee, had a great experience there in the Southeastern Conference," said Jones recently. "You know, we find out about life in the SEC. Going into our last year at Tennessee, we were 15-4 in our last 19 games. Had won three straight bowl games and finished in the top 10, I believe, two years in a row. And you're sitting at 4-6, and we had lost, I want to say 15 players to the National Football League — it was the first time in about 17 years that they had that. And our program just wasn't quite where we could sustain that. We had to continue to build. We did have the number one recruiting class in the country at the time. Jaycee Horn, number one overall pick. Michael Penix was our quarterback. Adrian Martinez was our other committed quarterback. So we had nailed it pretty good. But life in the SEC, 4-6, and you know, you find yourself unemployed."
There's some truth mixed in with Jones' comments combined with quite a few inaccuracies.
Let's start with the truths: Tennessee was indeed 15-4 in their last 19 games entering the 2017 season. Two of those four losses, however, were the brutal losses in 2016 to Vanderbilt and South Carolina (a couple of the worst losses in UT football history…and to be completely fair, the loss to South Carolina in 2022 under Josh Heupel is in that same category).
Tennessee had also won three straight bowl games going into the 2017 season. And UT did have commitments from Jaycee Horn, Michael Penix, and Adrian Martinez when Jones was fired.
Horn, who wasn't the No. 1 overall pick as Jones stated (he was No. 8 overall pick in the 2021 NFL Draft), decommitted from Tennessee on "Schiano Sunday" (two weeks after Jones was fired). Penix, meanwhile, didn't have his scholarship honored by Jones' successor, Jeremy Pruitt. And Martinez had an up-and-down college career at Nebraska and Kansas State and has since struggled to stick on an NFL roster.
The rest of Jones' comments aren't exactly accurate.
Tennessee didn't finish ranked in the top 10 two years in a row under Jones (the Vols finished No. 22 in 2015 and No. 22 in 2016 in the final AP Top 25 poll).
The Vols also only lost nine players to the NFL (six were drafted, three went undrafted) after the 2016 season. That's similar to what the Vols lost after the 2009 season and the 2006 season (UT had six players drafted after each of those seasons). I'm not sure where Jones got the "17 years" comment from, but he's been known to exaggerate before when it comes to his accomplishments at Tennessee (such as when he said the 2015 and 2016 seasons were some of the best years of UT football in 20 years….he apparently forgot about the Vols' success in the late 90s and early 2000s under Phillip Fulmer, or Tennessee's trip to the SEC Championship game in 2007, or beating Alabama, Georgia and Florida in the same season in 2004).
Something else that Jones forgot to mention, and it's one of the biggest reasons that Tennessee's roster wasn't in a good place in 2017, is the unusual amount of attrition that happened under his leadership.
The Vols had over 30 players transfer from Jones' first three recruiting classes (which is an insane number for the pre-transfer portal era). That doesn't include players who were either kicked off the team or ruled ineligible. That's why the Vols weren't able to overcome losing nine players to the NFL.
There were some good moments for the Vols during Jones' time at Tennessee. Beating Florida and Georgia in 2016 was big for the program. And Jones signed some great players in Josh Dobbs, Jauan Jennings, Alvin Kamara, Derek Barnett, and Jalen Reeves-Maybin, among many others, that will always be fan favorites on Rocky Top. But if Jones is going to talk about his time at Tennessee and why things went south, he should at least try to be accurate. The fan base that supported him for nearly five years deserves that much.
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