Butch Jones Had Made Tennessee Good Again, But Can The Vols Be Great?

Once upon a time, Tennessee was a top-tier football school. Depending on your age, that might not come as a shock. But if you're in your early 20s, a history lesson is in order: between 1995 and 2007, the Volunteers reached double-digit wins eight times, and even won a national championship in 1998.

Alas, the Tennessee of the past eight years is not the Tennessee of old. Since 2008, the Volunteers have cycled through four different coaches and finished ranked in the top 25 just once—and that was last season. The last time Tennessee was seriously in the national conversation, incoming college freshmen were in fourth grade.

In 2016, all of that may change.

Heading into their fourth season under head coach Butch Jones, the Vols are on an upward trajectory, and favored to win the (admittedly dreadful) SEC East. Led by star quarterback Josh Dobbs and running back Jalen Hurd, talent has returned to Knoxville—Jones' first full recruiting class in 2014 was ranked No. 7 in the country according to 247Sports, and his 2015 class was even better, ranking No. 4.

Wins have followed. After going 5-7 in 2013, Jones brought the Vols back to the postseason in 2014 with a dominating win over Iowa in the TaxSlayer Bowl. Last season, Tennessee finished 9-4 and blew out Northwestern in the Outback Bowl.

This fall, the Vols return 18 starters. Usual SEC East contenders Georgia and Florida are rebuilding. The table appears set for a full-fledged Tennessee revival—but is the program really back on the right track? Or does it need to do more?

First things first: Tennessee isn't the type of program that should need an eight-year rebuild, even after losing legendary coach Phil Fulmer to retirement following the 2008 season. Since his departure, however, pretty much everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

The Volunteers hired Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, despite Kiffin's poor record in Oakland. After a rocky year that resulted in recruiting violations and saw Kiffin pick fights with other coaches, college football's enfant terrible bolted for USC in such an off-putting, fan-antagonizing manner that that his mother was "terrified" for Kiffin's safety when he later returned to Knoxville as Alabama's offensive coordinator.

Kiffin was replaced by Derek Dooley, who like Kiffin had a questionable resume other than a famous football father—his dad, Vince Dooley, was a former coach at Georgia, while Monte Kiffin was a renowned NFL defensive coordinator. Dooley went 4-8 at Louisiana Tech the season before he left for Tennessee—in retrospect, not a good sign!—and he lasted just three years with the Vols, going 4-19 in Southeastern Conference while publicly comparing himself to a Nazi field marshall.

Next came Jones. He wasn't the Vols' first choice, or maybe even their fifth choice, given that the school was rejected by a number of candidates during a humbling coaching search. But so far, the results have made the process an afterthought. Jones has clearly been a better coach than his two predecessors, and with two straight seasons of two-win annual growth, he has Tennessee primed to win their SEC East.

On the other hand, that might be the problem: a division championship would be progress, for sure, but winning one of the worst divisions in football doesn't automatically make a team elite. And elite is what Tennessee fans, at least of a certain age, expect. The Vols want to be Alabama—once its rival, now the class of the SEC and the entire country, a school Tennessee hasn't beaten since 2006—and the coming season figures to be measuring stick for just how far the Vols are from that goal, and how close they might get.

Working against Tennessee? While Jones has clearly been a great recruiter, his actual coaching leaves much to be desired. He gave away what should have been a win against Oklahoma last season, and also got conservative after leading Florida 17-0, allowing the Gators to come back and win.

Those are fixable mistakes, but Jones doesn't sound as though he plans on fixing them, or like he even believes they were mistakes in the first place. "It's one or two plays, and I think it's putting everything in perspective," he said. "I really believe that. We're two plays away, we're 10 seconds away from being 4-0, and we're 2-2. We can't let two plays or 10 seconds define who we are."

At the highest level of college football, two plays or 10 seconds absolutely can define a season; the margin for error can be just that thin. Alabama's Nick Saban takes a lot of grief, much of it deserved, for his general joyless uptightness; that said, he wins in part by agonizing over those two plays and 10 seconds. So that's one reason for Vols fans to be concerned.

Here's another: if Tennessee doesn't meet expectations this year, Vols fans are looking at the likelihood of five years under Jones before they can contend for the College Football Playoff or a New Year's Six bowl. Given that most turnarounds, if they happen at all, happen after a coach's third year, that could be a problem. Recruiting could get stale, and in the hothouse SEC, things could get dicey. Continued, year-over-year win growth is hardly guaranteed, and it's possible that 2017 will be a step back for Tennessee after Dobbs and star linebacker Jalen Reeves-Maybin graduate and others possibly leave for the NFL.

As such, the stakes for Tennessee in 2016 are deceptively high. Even if the Vols win their division, will the season be considered a success without a big win over Alabama, or a victory in the SEC Championship Game? Will fans be content with 10 wins, if that also means a couple of losses to marquee opponents and no appearance in a New Year's Six bowl?

The road back to elite status is seldom linear. That's what makes college football fun. Nerve-wracking, too. Tennessee appears to be moving in the right direction, but this season also has the potential to show just how much farther the once-dominant Vols may have to go.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.