Will Tennessee ever become a power house again?

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people were asking this same question about bama when msu was crooming shula.

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people were asking this same question about bama when msu was crooming shula.

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Except there's actually is football talent around Alabama. Tennessee is in the far Eastern corner of the state. All of the instate talent is much closer to other SEC schools. For them to succeed, they have to recruit out of state.

They may be back. But they'll never be better then the 4th best SEC program. That's their ceiling.

the bordering states of tennessee are full of talent. don't act like recrutint talent to tenn is like trying to recruit nebraska. tenn has just had a string of awful coaching hires.

There's too much passion in Tennessee for football for them to stay down. Like another poster pointed out, many people thought Bama would never bounce back around 2006. Many Tennessee fans thought Bama was dead and gone then as well. Yes Tennessee will go back to seriously competing for SEC championships.

In the 90's UT was strong while UGA, Clemson, and USCe were all pretty meh. I wonder if there is a correlation between those programs' improvement and UT's decline. UT certainly doesn't cherry pick players out of Alabama like they did pre-Saban.

As noted, UT can't rely on in-state talent like Alabama did in order to get off the mat. They probably have a better shot than Nebraska but they share the same kind of problem.

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They're going to have trouble recruiting elite players in Georgia with Kirby here as well.

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Agreed

Yes, look at Dabo and Clemson. They need a good coach who can recruit and soak up some the Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia kids bordering the state. Hell Atlanta is only 3 hours away and has 3 of the top 10 national recruits for 2018.

I think they will get back to contending in the SEC east, if they make a good hire.

Tennessee has had a very volatile history.

They were a powerhouse in the 1930s and '40s with Neyland.

They were a solid program all the way up through about 1974. Then from 1975 through 1988, they were pretty bad:

1975: 7-5
1976: 6-5
1977: 4-7
1978: 5-5-1
1979: 7-5
1980: 5-6
1981: 8-4
1982: 6-5
1983: 9-3-1
1984: 7-5
1985: 9-1-2----> #4 AP Finish
1986: 7-5
1987: 10-2-1----> #14 AP Finish
1988: 5-6

That's ten seasons with 5 losses or more during a 14-year span.... and only two AP Top 20 finishes during those 14 years.

Then from 1989 up through 2007, they were easily the 2nd best program in the SEC and a Top 5 program nationally.

So they had 14 overall down years.
Then they had 19 overall good years.
Now they are having 10 more (and counting) overall down years.