Former Tennessee Vols Head Coach Derek Dooley Wouldn’t Be A Bad Choice For Ole Miss

Former Tennessee Vols head coach Derek Dooley is one of the favorites to replace Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss.

When you hear that former Tennessee Vols head coach Derek Dooley is one of the favorites to replace Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss, your first reaction might be to laugh.

Or feel bad for Ole Miss fans.

But I wouldn’t be so quick to make a joke out of the Dooley/Ole Miss talk.

Should Derek Dooley have been fired as Tennessee’s head coach at the end of 2012?

Absolutely.

Should he have been hired in 2010?

Absolutely not.

Dooley is an incredibly smart guy. He’s probably one of the smartest guys to ever be an SEC head coach. But when he took over at UT, he wasn’t ready to be a head coach.

After spending seven seasons under Nick Saban at LSU and the Miami Dolphins as a position coach, Dooley decided he wanted more. That’s understandable — the end goal as a coach is to become a head coach.

But Dooley skipped ahead a bit, becoming an athletic director/head coach at Louisiana Tech. He only had three years of head coaching experience, with zero years of experience as a coordinator, when the Volunteers hired him to lead one of the most storied programs in college football history.

And obviously Dooley had his missteps as Tennessee’s head coach, but it wasn’t all bad. The 2012 Vols were one of the best offensive teams in the history of the program.

Had Dooley hired a defensive coordinator not named Sal Sunseri, and stuck with a 4-3 defense, that Vol team would’ve easily finished with a winning record.

So while the results weren’t there for Dooley at Tennessee, the foundation of a decent coach was there.

If Ole Miss hired Dooley in 2017 as a head coach, they would be getting a much different head coach than Tennessee got in 2010.

Dooley now has six years of head coaching experience, three at one of the most prestigious college football schools in the nation, along with seven years of coaching experience in the NFL.

Oh and remember how we said Dooley is a smart guy? The former attorney has undoubtedly spent countless nights wondering what he could’ve done different at Tennessee. He’s definitely went over all the mistakes and learned from those mistakes.

And let’s face it — it’s not like a marquee head coach (someone like Chip Kelly) is going to willingly walk into that mess at Ole Miss.

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I’m not saying Dooley is some potential slam dunk hire at Ole Miss — he still has a career losing record as a head coach — but the idea of him being an option to replace Freeze isn’t nearly as laughable as some have made it out to be.