IMO, football is 99% of the deal. And I really do trust that Butch is the coach for our future AND THAT he wants to stay for the next decade AND THAT he has the best interests of the program at heart. Blackburn quite honestly needs to be his "how can I help man" and I suspect that's Blackburn's understanding of how things would work and that he is eager for the opportunity.Pays great...
Basketball wise the plan right now is to just let Barnes get us back to a few regular tourney appearances and look up 3 or 4 years from now and see where we are trajectory-wise.
SEC TV deal is set. Nothing for our AD to do or influence there.
Fund raising... sure we will need to keep building and improving Neyland. This is where Blackburn has to be in good, personality-wise, with the top 100 donors. Hamilton ended up having some faults, but he raised money even when we sucked. Can Blackburn do it when we win?
As for the other sports... lets not kid ourselves... Blackburn has no bona fide credentials on rebuilding swimming, tennis, baseball, golf or track, and those guys are just going to have to get 4th or 5th priority right now-football is at too crucial an inflection point.
Blackburn's drawback is that he is probably number 13 or 14 in Day 1 SEC pecking order, but we aren't asking for any immediate handouts right now either
Lady Vols can get f-cked as far as I am concerned...not 1997 anymore and they have been causing far more problems than they are worth the last few years...That entire enterprise w/o an effective Pat Summit around has been irrelevant and doing far more to drink the water than carry it.
Basketball wise the plan right now is to just let Barnes get us back to a few regular tourney appearances and look up 3 or 4 years from now and see where we are trajectory-wise.
SEC TV deal is set. Nothing for our AD to do or influence there.
Fund raising... sure we will need to keep building and improving Neyland. This is where Blackburn has to be in good, personality-wise, with the top 100 donors. Hamilton ended up having some faults, but he raised money even when we sucked. Can Blackburn do it when we win?
As for the other sports... lets not kid ourselves... Blackburn has no bona fide credentials on rebuilding swimming, tennis, baseball, golf or track, and those guys are just going to have to get 4th or 5th priority right now-football is at too crucial an inflection point.
Blackburn's drawback is that he is probably number 13 or 14 in Day 1 SEC pecking order, but we aren't asking for any immediate handouts right now either
Lady Vols can get f-cked as far as I am concerned...not 1997 anymore and they have been causing far more problems than they are worth the last few years...That entire enterprise w/o an effective Pat Summit around has been irrelevant and doing far more to drink the water than carry it.
