Lane Kiffin often gets the blame for the Tennessee Vols' decade of dysfunction, but it's really all the Tennessee Titans' fault
Former Tennessee Vols head coach Lane Kiffin often gets the blame for UT football's "decade of dysfunction" (shout out Mark Nagi). Kiffin left Tennessee in January 2010 — a terrible time to leave a program back in those days — for his "dream job" at USC. I don't blame Kiffin one bit for taking that […]
Former Tennessee Vols head coach Lane Kiffin often gets the blame for UT football's "decade of dysfunction" (shout out Mark Nagi).
Kiffin left Tennessee in January 2010 — a terrible time to leave a program back in those days — for his "dream job" at USC.
I don't blame Kiffin one bit for taking that job at USC. Who knows how often someone will get the opportunity to land the job they've dreamed for years of having. Kiffin didn't leave Tennessee because he was trying to hurt Vols fans, he just couldn't pass up on returning to California to take that job. Objectively, I get it.
It's why the USC job was open, however, that was ultimately the reason for the Vols' decade of dysfunction.
And the reason is a game that the Tennessee Titans won in the final week of the 2009 regular season.
In 2008, under Mike Holmgreen, the Seattle Seahawks went 4-12 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2002. Holmgreen announced before the season that he was going to retire following the 2008 campaign. Jim L. Mora, who was on staff as Seattle's defensive backs coach/assistant head coach, took over as the Seahawks' head coach for the 2009 season.
Seattle went 5-11 in 2009, dropping their final four games of the season. The Seahawks' final loss of the season came at home against the Titans.
If the Titans lose that game, then Seattle finishes with a 6-10 record with a win in the final home game of the season.
What followed after the Seahawks' loss to the Titans came as a surprise to everyone (which is why it's fair to assume that the Titans' win led to the events that followed).
Following the end of the regular season, Mora held his end-of-season press conference and made plans for the 2010 season. Two days later, however, he was surprisingly fired.
“I was very stunned to say the least, and I indicated so,” said Mora shortly after his firing. “I’ve never seen this happen like this before…I was very stunned. I don’t know that it’s even hit me yet.”
The move was surprising in part because of the injuries that Seattle dealt with during the 2009 season. But the availability of then-USC head coach Pete Carroll, who was looking to flee Los Angeles due to the looming sanctions that were about to hit the Trojans, almost certainly led to the decision to fire Mora.
Carroll's departure from USC, of course, is what led to Kiffin's shocking departure from Tennessee after just one season.
Due to the timing of Kiffin's departure, the Vols were forced to settle for Derek Dooley, who was then the head coach/athletic director at Louisiana Tech. That hasty hire led to three fruitless seasons, pushing the program even further behind its SEC peers.
We all know where it went from there. The Butch Jones era and the Jeremy Pruitt disaster lasted for eight seasons before the Vols finally escaped the wilderness by hiring Josh Heupel, who has led quite the revival on Rocky Top.
It was Seattle's inability to close out the 2009 season with a win against the Titans, though, that led to Kiffin's quick exit from Knoxville and served as the catalyst for a miserable decade for Tennessee fans. If the Seahawks wait one more season to hire Carroll, it's unlikely that Kiffin leaves Tennessee for USC (the sanctions for USC were announced during the summer of 2010 and Kiffin has gone on record saying he didn't know they would be as bad as they were).
Who knows how things would've turned out for Tennessee and Kiffin. He was certainly no saint during his time as the Vols head coach (he and his staff committed 12 secondary violations during his one season at UT). But having to hire Dooley in January, less than a month before national signing day, was the worst-case scenario for Tennessee. And it was that hire that truly set the program back.
None of it matters now, of course. The Tennessee program is in a great spot with Heupel at the helm. And it looks like the program is starting to reemerge as a potential powerhouse in the SEC. But still, there's a decade of memories and great games that Vols fans missed out on all because the Titans beat the Seahawks on a random Sunday over 15 years ago.
