Will John Currie's departure put an end to chaos at Tennessee?

Tennessee’s coaching search is much like its football season. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

You thought the Vols had bottomed out when they lost to Missouri by 33 points? Not quite.

They sunk even lower in a 42-24 loss to Vanderbilt, which I thought was the worst team in the league until it spent an evening on the same field with Tennessee.

But enough about the first eight-loss team in school history.

Let’s get back to UT’s more current embarrassment: Its search for a coach to replace Butch Jones, whose was dismissed from the premises after the loss to Missouri.

Late Thursday night, reports surfaced that UT athletic director John Currie was negotiating with Washington State coach Mike Leach. Then, Friday morning, we learned that Currie had been called back to Knoxville to be fired.

Guess chancellor Beverly Davenport isn’t a pirate fan. Or maybe, she feared that Leach, college football’s most famous pirate aficionado, was merely setting up Tennessee for another turn-down.

As the Greg Schiano fiasco unfolded last Sunday, I doubted Tennessee's first-year athletic director would be on the job much longer. But I thought he would last months, not days.

The Schiano deal was a disaster. UT hired the Ohio State defensive coordinator, then backed out after an overwhelming negative reaction from Tennessee fans. In a society as hellbent on litigation as this one, it’s not far-fetched to assume Schiano will take legal action.

So if the UT administration believed Currie were solely responsible for the debacle, maybe it should have fired him immediately, regrouped and put someone else in charge of the coaching search.

Instead, it allowed Currie to keep pursuing coaches, and getting nothing but rejections in return. It’s no wonder coaches from less distinguished programs like Purdue and North Carolina State would back away from the Tennessee job as though it were a contagious disease. They had good reason to wonder how much longer the man who hired them would be around.

I'm not surprised Currie was fired. I'm surprised by the timing.

If Currie could have landed Leach, much of his wayward search could have been forgiven. It would have been the coaching-search equivalent of a Hail Mary.

After spending most of the game going three-and-out, you suddenly turn into former Tennessee quarterback Joshua Dobb against Georgia in 2016, delivering a perfectly thrown half-the-field pass into the arms of a high-jumping Jauan Jennings in the end zone.

Boom! Touchdown, Tennessee.

That's how good of a hire Leach would have been. He isn’t just a proven winner. He has won at Texas Tech and Washington State, where your recruiting options are limited.

He’s also the most colorful person in college football and as smart of a coach as UT could have found. He would have combined his Air Raid Offense with the Vol Navy. He would have made Tennessee football fun again.

And now you fire Currie? If he could have brought Leach to Tennessee, he should have been applauded.

It really makes you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. More than one member of the national media has reported that former UT coach Phillip Fulmer, who campaigned for the athletic director’s job that Currie got, had worked to undermine Currie.

That wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

As enticing as a Leach hire could have been, perhaps that's wishful thinking. Once he got a whiff of the chaos, he probably would have backed away like all the others. 

John Adams is a senior columnist. He may be reached at 865-342-6284 or john.adams@knoxnews.com.Follow him at: Twitter.com/johnadamskns.

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