In my opinion White Danny is in a bit of a jam as he just extended coach Harper back in April, following an appearance in the SEC championship game and a visit to the Sweet 16, which should be automatic for legacy programs like Tennessee, but it isn't that way anymore. Absent a wholesale collapse in the SEC season, I don't get the impression a women's basketball coach search is what White Danny would like to be doing in March and April.
Tennessee has done a piZZ poor job of succession planning in all sports, particularly in the women's game, when most other schools have plans in place, Tennessee's athletic directors have had no desire to try and sell the women's program and the championship banners already hung to a proven head coach that is totally unrelated to coach Summitt. Harper is a Fulmer hire, which by definition raises the concern about what, if any, due diligence was actually done to look at her ability to recruit and develop top tier players at her prior stops and compete at a high level,
The recruiting strategy in 2023 was a disaster as the four targets all chose some place other than Tennessee and I'm not sure how the 2024 class will build out or what NIL money Tennessee is having to raise or to compete against for talent in the SEC. We are already distances behind LSU and South Carolina in our own conference and may be slipping further with the absence of a substantive 2023 class, but I'm moving toward the camp that White Danny doesn't give a rip about women's basketball and won't make any changes unless he was going to offer the UCF women's coach the job at Tennessee.
