Tennessee Vols: 5 Coaches That Could Lead Vols To A Championship

Can Butch Jones lead the Tennessee Vols to a national championship, or will it take someone else?

It would be a good idea, before we get too far into this rabbit hole, to point that I always look at Tennessee Vols football as a realist — not as an optimist or a pessimist.

There have been a lot of positives, and negatives, since Butch Jones took over as head coach in 2012.

Saying there’s been no progress made under Jones is a total fallacy.

Tennessee’s football program was complete garbage at the conclusion of the 2012 season, and the future looked quite dim.

Jones took the Vols from being a team that won five conference games in three seasons, to a team that’s won nine conference games in the past two years.

But there’s also a flip side.

We all know the 2016 Vols didn’t live up to expectations. Injuries certainly had a lot to do with that, but it’s hard to blame losses to South Carolina and Vanderbilt on injuries.

Nine wins in back to back seasons, given where the Vols were from 2008-2012 is definitely impressive.

Losing to the cellar dwellers of the SEC East, however, is not. Especially when you clearly have more talent — even with injuries.

That’s why a big question is “have we seen Butch Jones’ ceiling as a coach?”.

Jones isn’t a bad coach like a big group of fans seems to think.

Personally, I think he’s a solid coach that can consistently have the Vols in the 8 to 10 win range on a yearly basis.

But I’m not sure Jones is a national championship caliber coach.

Could he find lighting in a bottle at some point?

Perhaps he could. Maybe everything will go just right one year and the Vols will catch all the breaks and Jones will deliver a Gene Chizik-like national championship.

Is Jones capable of turning the Volunteers into a perennial top 5-10 program?

As of right now, no.

Which is why Tennessee is in a bit of a pickle at the moment.

Jones hasn’t done anything to warrant being fired. He’s on a Mark Richt like trajectory at UT, which isn’t a bad thing. But it also means that Tennessee isn’t going to be among the “elite” schools like Alabama, Clemson, or Ohio State at any point in the near future.

Maybe Jones will find his inner Dabo Swinney and flip the switch and find his niche as a coach, in the process turning the Vols into a force to be reckoned with in the SEC.

Or maybe he will continue to lead a program that’s consistently a top 15-25 team, that sometimes reaches the SEC championship game (something the Vols still haven’t done in a decade).

Regardless of what Butch ends up being capable of doing as a coach, here are five coaches (and a bonus wild card one) that I think could end up in Knoxville (if Tennessee’s athletic department decided they aren’t fans of Jones) and win a national championship.