Thamel: When you hire unqualified ADs, you get what’s happening at UT and South Carolina

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When you hire an unqualified athletic director Part 1: You get what’s happening at Tennessee, where Phillip Fulmer bid against himself to give Jeremy Pruitt an extension and raise this offseason. It’s a classic move for a novice AD. On the West Coast they call this “pulling a Lynn Swann” for his Clay Helton extension. Pruitt’s buyout is more than $12.5 million, which considering the miserable state of Tennessee’s finances before the pandemic would seem to be untenable. But with Tennessee, emotion and meddling boosters have long won out over logic. The Vols are 2-4, and there’s a clear path to a 3-7 finish. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Tennessee the last dozen years, a complete administrative mess is the baseline expectation.

When you hire an unqualified AD Part 2: South Carolina’s exhaustive AD search ended down the hall with their baseball coach, a 1980s way of thinking that’s gotten them the predictable underwhelming results. The tell if South Carolina is motivated to fire Will Muschamp in 2020 will be if they oust Ray Tanner, the overmatched athletic director, in the next few weeks. If he’s abruptly ousted soon, South Carolina could in theory find a replacement to work with the new coach. But time is running out. They’ll also have to find more than $13 million to buy out Muschamp, who was Tanner’s pick as head coach. South Carolina has long lagged behind its SEC brethren in athletic department sophistication. Can president Bob Caslen, hired in 2019, pull all this off amid a pandemic? If 2-4 turns to 2-8 for the Gamecocks, they’ll be increasing noise to make moves. Hopelessness is expensive, too.

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