Tennessee's Phillip Fulmer should've been fired for cause just like Jeremy Pruitt
Tennessee's Phillip Fulmer should've been fired for cause just like Jeremy Pruitt
By allowing Fulmer to walk away with a pocketful of cash, Tennessee allowed Fulmer to leave with a hero's farewell, despite the Pruitt scandal being one of his own making
While the University of Tennessee and its fans are wondering what comes next for its football program, following the NCAA’s official notification of 18 Level I recruiting infractions committed by former coach Jeremy Pruitt and members of his staff, the university’s former athletics director, Phillip Fulmer, is sitting at home and being paid $37,500 by the school this month.
Fulmer will also be paid $37,500 next month, and every month through the end of 2023, just as he was paid $37,500 each month from January 2021 until now.
It was under Fulmer’s watch that the recruiting violations, detailed by the NCAA in a 51-page letter to the university on Friday, occurred. For his role in the scandal, Fulmer was fired by university chancellor Donde Plowman, but was awarded a handsome seven-figure buyout. For those keeping score at home, January 2021 marked the second time Fulmer was fired by Tennessee, and the second time he walked away with a multimillion-dollar settlement.
In the world of Division I college athletics, it pays to not be very good at your job.
To be fair, Fulmer was not named in the NCAA’s report. Quite the opposite, the NCAA noted that the university was not being slapped with the dreaded “Lack of Institutional Control” violation, or LOIC, a finding that tends to lead to enhanced penalties.
But 18 Level I infractions are serious stuff. A Level I violation is supposed to be the most egregious violation you can commit under the NCAA’s recruiting rules. Significant additional penalties don’t seem likely in Tennessee’s case, due in no small part to the new era of college athletics that we find ourselves in and the NCAA’s shift that is an attempt to focus penalties on guilty coaches and away from student-athletes who weren’t at the school when the violations occurred. Tennessee docked itself 12 scholarships last year, along with some additional self-imposed penalties, and has been praised by the NCAA for its transparency and handling of the Pruitt scandal. But in years past, 18 Level I infractions would have brought down the thunder from the NCAA: scholarship reductions, vacated wins and championships (as if Tennessee has any championships to vacate), postseason pans, etc.
For a sitting athletics director to truly have no knowledge that 18 Level I infractions were being committed within his program, he would either have to be intentionally turning a blind eye, or be completely incompetent. In neither case would he be worth a $37,500-per-month payout to walk away from the job.
The truth is that Tennessee’s current NCAA woes — the biggest NCAA rules violation in the university’s history — is one that is completely of Fulmer’s making, even if he wasn’t implicitly involved in it. So while Pruitt and former assistant coach Brian Neidermeyer — neither of whom should ever coach in college athletics again — are drawing the bulk of Tennessee fans’ ire, let’s not be so quick to give Fulmer a free pass.
Whether or not you believe the university was justified in firing Fulmer as the school’s football coach in 2008 — and a growing number of Tennessee fans don’t believe that, because they’re letting more than a decade’s worth of horrible administrative decisions color their judgment — he was named athletics director in 2017 with zero qualifications for the job. It was a feel-good moment for legions of fans who fondly remember the 1990s and hold Fulmer up as a sort of father of Tennessee football. But it still should’ve never happened. For that, upper leadership at the university deserve some blame, as do the deep-pocketed boosters who have undeniably made Tennessee’s sports programs better but who wield far too much influence over the decision-making on campus. Ultimately, though, Fulmer’s appointment as athletics director was the culmination of 10 years of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Fulmer and his closest allies.
Fulmer always believed he was fired unjustly back in 2008, when the Vols finished 5-7 and failed to make a bowl game for the second time in three years. He spent several years coveting the role of athletics director, scheming for a way to get it. And while he couldn’t return to the job he really wanted — head football coach — he could do the next-best thing as athletics director: hire a coach he could control. Or, at least, a coach he thought he could control. As it turned out, no one could control Jeremy Pruitt — least of all an unqualified athletics director.
Back up to 2008. Tennessee hired a failed Oakland Raiders coach named Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, an experiment that failed disastrously and cemented the downturn of the Tennessee football brand. Behind the scenes, working as hard against Kiffin as he’d worked against the coach who preceded him, John Majors, was Phillip Fulmer.
Then came Kiffin’s late-night flight to Southern California, and the incredibly boneheaded hire of Derek Dooley that followed, and Fulmer spent the next three years attempting to undercut Dooley. Then Dooley was fired, Butch Jones was hired, and it was more of the same for four years after that.
In the midst of it all, Mike Hamilton — the man who fired Fulmer — retired as athletics director and the university tapped Dave Hart to replace him. Hart retired in 2016, after a lackluster six years on the job, and Fulmer lobbied heavily for the job. He didn’t get it; it went to John Currie instead. But Fulmer was named a “special advisor” by the university, a part-time gig that paid him $100,000 annually and was really just an attempt to placate Fulmer and avoid further fracturing the fan base.
As it turned out, Currie would last less than eight months on the job. His decision to fire Butch Jones was the right move. His attempt to replace Jones was an unmitigated disaster.
First Currie tried to hire former Penn State assistant Greg Schiano, a deeply unpopular move that led to a mesmerizing fan revolt and gave life to the Fulmer coup. It almost worked, though; would’ve worked if Currie could’ve gotten Schiano on campus that fateful Sunday afternoon before word got out. You can’t just unhire a coach, after all, and Currie was already working the national sportswriters to help paint the hire in a favorable light in order to sell it to Tennessee fans — a failed effort for which those national sportswriters have not forgiven Vols fans.
The Schiano hire didn’t happen because someone leaked it hours before it became a reality. Who? Who knows. But if you think the leak has Fulmer’s fingerprints all over it, you probably aren’t far wrong.
For however badly he might have screwed up with the attempt to hire Schiano, Currie had his next man lined up. He headed to the West Coast to talk to Mike Leach, the eccentric — though successful and entertaining — Washington State coach who would have likely followed Currie back to Knoxville.
Except, back in Knoxville, Fulmer and some of his mega-booster allies who were working feverishly on his behalf finally had their ducks in a row. Currie was unceremoniously ordered back to campus. On Friday, Dec. 1, he was fired by Beverly Davenport. That same day, Davenport named Fulmer the athletics director.
Sportswriters still talk about “Schiano Sunday.” They don’t talk nearly enough about “Fulmer Friday.”
It had been less than eight months since Fulmer had been passed over for the athletics director’s job; almost exactly 10 years since he had been paid a seven-figure buyout to “resign” as football coach and then was carried off the field by his players following a career-ending win over Kentucky.
There were immediate rumors — as much wishful thinking by a segment of the fanbase as anything else — that Fulmer would name himself head coach, similar to what Gregg Popovich did as general manager of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs back in the early ‘90s. Fulmer didn’t do that. Instead, he went out and found himself a younger version of himself: Jeremy Pruitt.
Pruitt wasn’t often rumored as a head coaching candidate as the Thanksgiving leftovers turned stale back in 2017. He was viewed as a successful defensive coordinator under Nick Saban, but he wasn’t necessarily on anyone’s head coaching short list — except Fulmer’s. Because in Pruitt, Fulmer saw a coach who thought a whole lot like Fulmer thought back in the ‘90s — back when he was beating almost everyone not named Florida, back before the game passed him by.
Back then, Fulmer was an offensive-minded coach, had always coached on the offensive side of the ball. But he had many of the same tendencies as Pruitt: old-school, smash-mouth football, with an emphasis on running the football, playing sound defense and winning the battle of field position, getting under center in goal line situations, and recruiting actual tight ends and fullbacks — corn-fed boys who could lay a lick to you just as easily as they could tote the rock or catch it.
More than that, Pruitt represented a coach who Fulmer could control. It was only a few months after Pruitt’s hire before Fulmer had his hand smacked by the NCAA for assisting at practices.
The rest, as they say, is history. Pruitt may well have been the worst cheater in the history of a sport that is rife with cheating. He and his bagmen — which included his wife, Casey — doled out $60,000 in cash and impermissible benefits to recruits, and his team still lost to Georgia State in 2019, then went 3-7 in 2020 in what might have been the single most disappointing season in school history.
By that point, as Pruitt was losing six straight games, including a humiliating 34-7 loss to Kentucky, Tennessee was more than happy to get rid of him. And the university fell on its sword with the NCAA to do so.
Fulmer proved to be collateral damage, when he was also fired by the university and its chancellor, Plowman.
But today, almost two years later, as Plowman and UT’s other top brass are being praised by the NCAA for their handling of the Pruitt debacle, the one thing that they almost certainly got wrong was allowing Fulmer to ride away with a hero’s goodbye and a pocketful of cash to boot.
Maybe Tennessee shouldn’t have fired Fulmer in 2008. But it did, and that was a decision the university should have stood by. Allowing Fulmer to eventually work himself into a job that he was unqualified for because someone felt guilty that a national championship-winning coach had been so brutally dismissed was a terrible idea that was always bound to end terribly.
It’s been 30 years now since old John Majors called Fulmer an opportunistic backstabber, accusing his offensive coordinator of worming his way into the head coaching job while Majors lay in a hospital bed, recovering from open heart surgery. Maybe Fulmer was a better coach and a better recruiter than Majors. After all, for the successes that he had, Majors couldn’t beat Alabama.
And there was Fulmer, getting the team into the national championship conversation at the start of the ’92 season in his interim role. But, for all of his own successes, Fulmer couldn’t beat Florida — at least not until 1998, when he did beat the Gators, and the Vols went on to win a national championship, and for that no one who is a Tennessee fan will ever forget the fond memories of that entire decade of football.
Of course, Majors’ 1989 and 1990 teams were pretty darned good in their own right, as were Majors-recruited players like Carl Pickens, Alvin Harper, Dale Carter, Reggie Cobb, Chuck Webb and Heath Shuler. And Majors won more SEC championships in his last eight years on the job — three, in 1985, 1989 and 1990 — than Fulmer won in his 16 years on the job — two, in 1997 and 1998.
But, in the end, it really wasn’t about wins and losses and jimmies and joes. Majors liked to hit the bottle a little too much, didn’t really care who he ticked off, and so three straight losses to knock Tennessee out of the SEC championship race as soon as he returned from heart surgery was the only excuse the powers-who-were needed.
That’s all really neither here nor there. What happened in 1992 really had very little bearing on what happened in 2017 and the fallout that continues today. Except for this: History really does repeat itself, especially for those who fail to learn from it.
And so here we are. If we believe Majors and a few others who’ve dared to speak up over the years, Fulmer ruthlessly muscled his way into the head coaching role in 1992. It all turned out pretty well, of course, as long as your name wasn’t John Majors. But that breathed an entirely new life into Fulmer, and much later he spent another 10 years muscling his way around behind the scenes of the Tennessee football program until he got what he wanted in 2017. And, this time, it ended in disaster.
Fulmer should’ve been fired for cause, just like Jeremy Pruitt, just like Brian Neidermeyer, and just like the others who were actually breaking the rules. Because everything that happened with Pruitt was a disaster of Fulmer’s making. He didn’t cheat; his intentions may have even been pure. But he created the disaster even if it was only because he sold himself into a job that he was unequipped to perform — even if it was because in his attempt to create a new version of himself as a coach he accidentally created a Frankenstein.
Tennessee football is embroiled in uncertainty today because one man’s ego was bigger than any man’s ego ought to ever be.