Choppy: Quiet No More
Disclosure: I am a 2002 Graduate of the University of Tennessee.
I bit my tongue long enough.
I stayed quiet long enough.
I sat by and watched MY UNIVERSITY be taken hostage by a mob on Twitter, protesters in the streets, inexcusable messages painted on "The Rock," all to stop the hiring of a football coach and completely ruin his name in the process.
I can't take it anymore.
College football coaching searches suck. They aren't fun, pending some fabulous result they often do more harm than good, and they too often make it impossible for the incoming coach to achieve expectations.
The worst people to have a voice when it comes to coaching searches are the fans and the media. The. Worst. Nobody, as a whole, is less informed than those two groups about the vetting and interview process of coaching searches.
Sure, there are some who are plugged in, some who get it. But as a whole, if you're listening to the fans or media about how to run the University of Tennessee athletic department (and any other schools'), you'll eventually be buying seats next to them if you want to keep watching the games.
Even some of the most plugged in make head-scratching reports. Clay Travis, as plugged in as it gets for College Football (and a guy I really like and defend), had the 'slapdick' report that Jason Witten, one of the best teammates the NFL has ever seen, would for some reason walk out on his Cowboys teammates in the middle of the year to take over the Tennessee job.
What?
I'm 100% confident Clay didn't make that up. I'm also positive that he needs to delete the phone number of whoever told him that insane "report," and never speak to them again.
The idiots who first pointed out that Greg Schiano had a 68-67 coaching record at Rutgers conveniently leave out that he was 3-20 to start. That 65-47 doesn't look as horrible now, does it? He proceeded to win 43 games in a 5-year-span. Yeah, that's just trash.
The man won ... AT RUTGERS! The worst Division-I program of the last half-century. They've been to 10 bowl games in 145 years ... but did it six in 11 years under Schiano.
Winning eight games in a year at Rutgers is the equivalent of winning at National Title at Texas.
But that public-driven snub just showed simple football ignorance. If that is where my Vols' stumbling ended, no harm no foul, and I could have dealt with it.
It wasn't.
They proceeded to spend the next five hours calling this man a "Child Rape Enabler." That is disgusting. You people, MY PEOPLE, should be ashamed. They have tarnished the name of my school, the one that I love so much, essentially because the coach wasn't named Gruden.
You guys are killing me. It was bad enough you didn't have the basic football knowledge to recognize how hard a job it was for Schiano to remotely succeed at Rutgers, then you decided to take it a step further and completely convict a guy on a third-party account of a Penn State story from two decades ago.
Cool.
I hope whoever painted the Rock with "Schiano covered up Child Rape at Penn State" gets outed immediately, never gets a job anywhere, and is forced to become a Kentucky football fan. He's a loser. Double his tuition, throw him off campus, he gotsta go.
Hire Tee Martin, please? Although, I'm sure there will be some people out there who will find a bad reason not to hire him, too.