Tennessee Vols blown out by Georgia, and Butch Jones is in trouble

KNOXVILLE — Second-year Georgia coach Kirby Smart and his true freshman quarterback just came to Neyland Stadium and put a 41-0 beating on fifth-year Tennessee coach Butch Jones and his junior quarterback, a clear indication of where both outfits are heading.

The No. 8 Bulldogs are headed toward Atlanta. Georgia (5-0, 2-0 SEC) is the second-best team in the league and might even be able to stay within 14 points or so of No. 1 Alabama in the title game. The Vols are headed toward a coaching change.

And please understand, this is not a call for Jones to be fired now. His team is 3-2 with losses to Florida and Georgia and a lot of season left to play. This is simply a guess, but it’s well-educated by now: The Vols have several more losses in them.

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More than athletic director John Currie, who was smiling and shaking hands in the press box before Saturday’s ugliness, will be able to brush off. More than Vols fans, who created a terrific atmosphere and then let out justifiable boos with their team down 24-0 at halftime, will be able to stand.

No AD wants to be put on the spot this early in a tenure, because once Currie picks a coach, he bears much more responsibility for the product on the field. And it’s true that there is no clear home run out there — there’s no guarantee that the next coach will outdo what Jones has done. He’s done very well to lift the Vols from the Derek Dooley depths to respectability.

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But Tennessee football should be better than this. Tennessee football should be great. It should compete for championships. And by the fifth year of a program, that trajectory should be clear. Jones himself mentioned the “tradition of excellence that we expect” in a post-game press conference that was very mundane and matter-of-fact.

You need two hands and no more to count the programs in this country with the combination of resources, facilities, fan support, tradition and access to talent that UT has. You might need the same to count up the Power 5 schools right now with a worse offense than UT has.

What will be lost in Saturday’s misery is the fact that Bob Shoop’s defense came ready to play. Quinten Dormady telegraphed an interception on the first play from scrimmage, and the Vols held and forced a field goal. They flew around. They showed emotion.

They got after freshman Jake Fromm. They picked him once and should have picked him twice. But you can only cover for an offense that bad for so long, and by the end of the half the Vols were gassed and frequently gashed.

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Fromm recovered from early shakes to command the game. On one key third-and-9 he detected a corner blitz coming to his left and checked into a run right for 22 yards. Fromm didn’t have to do a ton, but his confidence and feel for making plays stood in sharp contrast to Dormady.

Dormady (5 for 16, two picks, replaced by Jarrett Guarantano in the third quarter) is a talented, impressive kid, and first-year offensive coordinator Larry Scott is going to be a head coach some day. But this isn’t working. Injuries don’t explain it all. And this is Jones’ area of expertise.

As long as he’s head coach, the Tennessee offense will be his offense. It turned the ball over four times and needed almost three quarters to reach 100 yards Saturday.

“It was as bad an offensive performance as I’ve ever been a part of,” Jones said, “and it’s inexcusable.”

Jones was lampooned Saturday on ESPN’s “GameDay” for his Monday press conference, during which he said, among other things: “What do we want out of our media?”

There are so many snarky responses that can be applied to that now, but here’s a serious one: He better hope they’re wrong. It’s possible — at least one (cough, cough) actually picked the Vols to win this game. There is only one certain loss left on the schedule, at Alabama.  

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But how many certain wins can you find? Southern Miss? At Missouri? The next game, Oct. 14 against South Carolina, looks like a toss-up. The press box was abuzz with talk of coaching candidates and ugly afternoons ahead for this team. The sights and sounds of painful change are everywhere.

You had to feel for players such as Kendal Vickers, who said of the days ahead: “This week is going to show a lot about everybody’s character and what type of men we’ve got in that locker room.”

Jones sprinted to that locker room after the final snap, police escorts by his side. A young man in an orange No. 16 jersey — the number of Saturday’s guest of honor, Peyton Manning — leaned over the railing to yell something indistinguishable at him. It didn’t look nice.

By then, most of the crowd of 102,455 had said enough by being somewhere else. These people are ready to move on.

Contact Joe Rexrode at jrexrode@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.