He really wanted to see that class play out.
Butch Jones really wanted to see his 2018 recruiting class in action, but he couldn’t make it to the finish line to close the 2017 season. Tennessee pulled the plug on Jones after a 4-6 start to the season.
The temperature was already rising in Knoxville after an embarrassing end to the 2016 season. With a Sugar Bowl berth on the line, Tennessee laid an egg against Vanderbilt and was forced to the Music City Bowl. Going 9-4 and losing to Vandy with that roster just wasn’t good enough, plain and simple.
With so much roster turnover next season, the wheels fell completely off.
“At the University of Tennessee, had a great experience there in the Southeastern Conference,” Jones said this month during an appearance on the Coaches and The Mouth podcast. “You know, we find out about life in the SEC. Going into our last year at Tennessee, we were 15-4 in our last 19 games. Had won three straight bowl games and finished in the top 10, I believe, two years in a row. And you’re sitting at 4-6, and we had lost, I want to say 15 players to the National Football League — it was the first time in about 17 years that they had that. And our program just wasn’t quite where we could sustain that. We had to continue to build.
With no answers at quarterback, the season was doomed from the start. A shutout loss to Georgia, scoring in the single digits against Alabama and South Carolina, a near loss to UMass? It was over.
But Jones still clearly plays the what-if game. He and his staff had assembled a big time recruiting class, one that included — many forget this part of the equation — Michael Penix Jr.
“We did have the number one recruiting class in the country at the time. Jaycee Horn, No. 1 overall pick. Michael Penix was our quarterback. Adrian Martinez was our other committed quarterback. So we had nailed it pretty good. But life in the SEC, 4-6, and you know, you find yourself unemployed.”
Penix in the orange and white would have been really interesting to see, especially coming off of the success that Josh Dobbs had with Jones. But Butch came up short in 2017, and his class fell apart after he was fired. Horn ended up at South Carolina, Martinez went to Nebraska and Penix ended up at Indiana.
And then began the wildest coaching search of all time.
Butch went on to famously intern for Nick Saban at Alabama before landing at Arkansas State. Jones has actually started to turn that program around, going 8-5 with a bowl win last season. He’ll head into year five this fall.