At Tennessee, a weakened Volunteer spirit

• When it was finally revealed Friday morning that Hart, the athletic director, had settled on Butch Jones from Cincinnati, about all most Tennessee fans knew of him was that he had once lost to Derek Dooley, the man they had just run out of town

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – "Dave Hart is a bungling moron," a local radio host named Tony Basilio screamed into his microphone just past 11 a.m. on the day that was supposed to make the Tennessee fan base whole.

Maybe that was to be expected. The past few weeks had been tense, as they always are in the search for a new football coach when one says no, and the next one says no, and by the time you bundle all those rejections, nobody is really in the mood to take yes for an answer. When it was finally revealed Friday morning that Hart, the athletic director, had settled on Butch Jones from Cincinnati, about all most Tennessee fans knew of him was that he had once lost to Derek Dooley, the man they had just run out of town.

Focusing on that one detail of Jones' career is ridiculous, of course. But for the Tennessee fan base, which has suffered not just through several years of bad football but a meltdown across the entire athletic department, cynicism has practically become its own life force. One embarrassment after another has emanated from this place, and at some point you just become conditioned to focus not on the numerous things that suggest Jones can win at Tennessee, but the one thing that suggests he can't.

Hart, who has rarely been seen or heard from in public since taking the job 15 months ago, seems to understand the dynamics at Tennessee at this point in time. After all the formal press conference festivities were finished Friday, he stood in a corner of the Tennessee locker room completely exhausted, but ready to acknowledge the stakes of what had just taken place.

"We've had a tough five years. We've had a tough run," Hart said. "There's no doubt we have to get football healthy. Mondays in Knoxville are determined by what happens on Saturday. Right or wrong, it's the rallying point for the university."

Had Tennessee's football program been humming along for the past decade like it did in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the other stuff wouldn't have mattered so much. But from the moment the Vols fired Phillip Fulmer following the 2008 season, it seemed the entire athletic department had been caught in a spin cycle of karmic retribution.

Lane Kiffin was hired, then bolted for Southern Cal after just one year while leaving a trail of NCAA violations for the school to deal with. Bruce Pearl, the most successful and popular basketball coach in school history, lied to the NCAA about minor violations and had to be fired in March 2011. Athletic director Mike Hamilton was fired soon after. Tennessee baseball became the worst program in the Southeastern Conference under Todd Raleigh, and he had to be fired. In August 2011, Pat Summitt – arguably the most respected coach on any college campus in America – announced she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which would force her into retirement just eight months later.

Meanwhile, as he attempted to reorganize the department and streamline the budget – yes, Tennessee was having financial problems, too, after all those firings and new facilities Hamilton built – Hart got slapped with two lawsuits alleging gender discrimination.

And as all this is happening, Dooley is losing football games – a lot of football games – and crowds in 102,000-seat Neyland Stadium are disappearing.

Dooley, the son of a legendary coach, comes in with great promise but goes 6-7 in his first year, including the incomprehensible 16-14 loss at LSU in which Tennessee appeared to make a game-winning, goal-line stand but was penalized for having 13 men on the field. He goes 5-7 in his second year, but it's hard to tell whether things are really getting better or worse because the quarterback and wide receiver both got hurt. Everyone understands that the third year is win-or-else.

But then after a promising season opener against N.C. State the bottom fell out, as Tennessee sunk to 1-7 in the SEC and got blown out routinely, even by Vanderbilt (41-18) on Nov. 17. Dooley was fired the next day having never beaten a top-25 team in three seasons.

Coaching searches are a little like presidential elections in that every time one happens, people claim it's the "most important of our lifetime." In Tennessee's case, though, that actually might be true. College programs ebb and flow, but another bad hire following Dooley would probably sink the program for another 5-7 years, at which point Tennessee's national football brand becomes no more relevant than that of Iowa or Arizona.

Which means the future of Tennessee athletics, in many ways, falls on the work done the past few weeks by Hart, a man few fans know and even fewer trust. When Hart was hired, he already had a strike against him because he was the No. 2 in charge at Alabama, which is Tennessee's biggest historical rival. And given that the waters have remained choppy under his leadership, he did not exactly go into this coaching search with a strong approval rating in Vol Nation.

"He's the right person for the job at the right time," Jimmy Cheek, the university's chancellor, said. "He's moving us significantly forward in the right direction and we're making good hires, so our programs are in place. The NCAA is behind us; there's nothing we can do about that. It was from a completely different era and we're just looking toward the future toward a great football program and great athletic programs. We've chosen the right head coach in Butch Jones and he's going to help us solve our football problem."

Whether Cheek is truly engaged and invested in the success of the athletic department is a huge point of skepticism among Tennessee fans right now. But Hart understands that if Jones succeeds, whatever other problems or questions may exist will go away. This is a football school in a football conference, and it has been a non-factor for too long. A few wins would relieve the pressure on everyone.

"Our alumni, our fan base, we have to come together as one and get Tennessee football back where we all want it," Hart said. "And I'm absolutely confident that's what this fan base will do."

Jones, though, isn't a name that will automatically do that. It will take some work. A Jon Gruden, a Mike Gundy, a Bob Stoops; those were the coaches who would have been viewed as surefire winners. They were also unrealistic.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in college football who believes Butch Jones is a bad hire or that he won't be able to win at Tennessee. His record at Central Michigan (27-13) and Cincinnati (23-14), as well as his reputation as a strong recruiter, suggests he'll do fine. But there's almost always an unknown unless you're hiring a Nick Saban or Urban Meyer or Stoops. Even Gruden, who was the obsession of the Tennessee fan base for weeks, had never proven anything in the college game.

Tennessee will have to find out along with the rest of us whether Jones is up to the job or whether, as the radio host said, Hart is a "bungling moron."

For all the doubts that may have lingered over this hire or this process, Jones will get his honeymoon for a few hours, anyway. After introducing his wife and three sons – "Andrew's already committed to Tennessee," he said of his 5-year old – he spent the next 25 minutes regurgitating every single cliché from the new coach's handbook.

He called Tennessee "the best college football program in America," though even at its peak it wasn't that. He called it "his dream job," even though it stretches all credulity to believe someone who grew up in Michigan and never worked a day in the Southeast would actually believe that. When asked about being Tennessee's fourth choice (at best), he joked that he was his wife's third choice and it worked out OK. Even though that joke has been told at endless coaches press conferences, everyone laughed.

For those few hours anyway, all the problems that face Tennessee's football program and athletic department seemed to go away. Reality will set in again, at some point. Jones will discover he does not have the best football program in America and he does not have a very good roster and there's a lot of repair work to be done in recruiting and with fans.

But ultimately, that's what coaching changes are all about in college athletics. Nobody knows whether Jones will succeed or fail, but as of today, at least the former is still an option.