Tennessee Coaching Search: Who Will It Be For The Vols?

Is the Tennessee Vols’ coaching search about to come to an end?

It looks like the Tennessee Vols’ coaching search could be coming to an end on Sunday.

Reed Carringer, who used to cover the Volunteers for “Rocky Top Insider” and “Football Time in Tennessee”, tweeted on Saturday night that Tennessee has their man and an announcement is expected on Sunday.

I’m weary of a lot of folks and their “sources” when it comes to coaching searches. But I know Reed personally, and I know he wouldn’t tweet something like this unless he trusted the information he was given.

So if we are expecting the announcement/report on Sunday, that narrows the list of potential coaches that Tennessee might hire.

Assuming they had their guy late Saturday night, it would presumably rule out coaches who had a game on Saturday or still have a conference championship game to play. That means we’d rule out Chris Petersen, Mike Leach, Matt Campbell, Scott Frost, Lane Kiffin (even though he likely never got a sniff anyway), Jeff Brohm, and Mike Norvell.

That doesn’t leave a lot of options. In fact, I think it leaves three distinct possibilities — Dan Mullen, Jon Gruden and Greg Schiano.

I put Schiano there because even though Ohio State had a game yesterday, I do believe John Currie could have interviewed him in Michigan after the Buckeyes’ win. I don’t think he’d fly to the location of a team to interview a sitting head coach, but I could see that scenario happening with an assistant coach.

But with that said, I doubt the hire will be Schiano — he has too much baggage from his Penn State days.

That leaves Mullen and Gruden. I think Mullen is obviously more likely. His team played on Thursday night and he’s been viewed by a lot of folks as the front runner for the job for at least a week now.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he hear on Sunday that Mullen is Tennessee’s next coach.

But we can’t officially rule out Gruden yet.

Gruden has yet to publicly turn down the job, and things have been strangely quiet on that front over the last week.

I reached out to ESPN reps on Saturday night (as I often have this season) to confirm that Gruden was in Baltimore preparing for the Monday Night Football matchup between the Ravens and Texans.

Typically I receive a confirmation that Gruden has attended production meetings, or was at the host team’s practice.

I did not receive that confirmation this week.

Instead, I was told “Based on schedule, our crew arrived in Baltimore yesterday and attended Ravens practice”.

Perhaps that means nothing and was just the answer they felt like giving me. But it is odd that Gruden wasn’t specially addressed.

Next: It's Time For John Currie To Fix UT Football

At this point, I think Mullen is Tennessee’s guy, but I do think there’s at least a small chance that Gruden ends up being announced.