Currie would have probably been a decent AD. There was just too much dysfunction around the University during that time.
He was only on the job for 8 or 9 months. It was easy to make him the scapegoat of all problems at UTAD.
He had ideas that were way overdue in creating a single athletic department with a single identity and ran into a buzzsaw with the
She-Woman Man Haters Club that makes way too much noise- and contributes little of their own money.
* The "Lady Vols" name still needs to go away. There should only be "Vols". The concept is outdated and creates tribalism within a single organization, boosters, and fanbase. People actually thought going to single nickname/mascot meant the school was defunding or deemphasizing women's sports.
* Schiano was clearly a better choice than who was eventually hired.
* Currie was clearly a better choice at AD than who was hired to replace him.
* The Tennessee fanbase was at its most dysfunctional. Unless Currie hired a defending national championship coach, they were going to abhor whoever was the frontrunner.
* The administration- especially on the women's side was filled with too many unqualified hacks..
* He neither fired or hired a men or women's basketball coach
* He may have made the second best hire of a SEC baseball coach ever. (Skip Bertman) or at least of a coach with no prior association with the school.
* He faced a rolling financial roadblock of coaching payouts, reduced donations, and huge overhead- that also created the dysfunction with the fans, boosters and within the department.
I hate to say this, but John Currie was the AD Tennessee needed. (Here come some metaphors) He was willing to yank off the Band-Aid and get rid of some overpaid parasites within the program. He needed. He was willing to take the slings-and-arrows from militant Subaruism and BlueHairs to combine the two departments and run the combined entity like he was hired to do. At 99.9% of colleges, adding the word "Lady" or suffix "ette" to a nickname was considered sexist. However, simple petty politics has kicked the inevitable decision down the road to another day and the athletic department still remains divided with seperate identies. It makes ZERO sense. Even keeping the name "Lady Vols" in an effort to honor Pat Summitt will only make it harder for the program to move on and do things a different - and possibly better way. I hope the outsider Kim Caldwell hire helps move the process along a little but the name on the jerseys will make it unnecessarily harder for her.
Discharging Currie without a qualified replacement ready to go was especially foolhardy.
To me, the continued use of the name "Lady Vols" is roughly the logical equivalent of customized pronouns and putting those pronouns in your email signature.
