Adams: UT needs coordinator with offense on his mind : govolsxtra.com

Tennessee has lost its offensive coordinator. It hasn't lost its offensive system.

Coaches come and go. UT's system is forever. Or so it seems.

That's why no one should have been shocked to hear that NFL assistant coach Kippy Brown might be a candidate for the offensive coordinator's job David Cutcliffe exchanged for a head-coaching job at Duke.

Brown has a solid coaching resume. More importantly, he has a history with UT's offensive system - the one that Johnny Majors coached; the one to which Phillip Fulmer has remained devoted in his 15 years as head coach.

I'm not sure who else is on Fulmer's shopping list. But my best guess is the list includes coaches on the current staff as well as former assistant coaches on the UT staff.

That's how the system works. It's familiar. It's comfortable. It's Tennessee.

Two years ago, when offensive coordinator Randy Sanders resigned, there was no debating whom Fulmer would hire. Cutcliffe was in town and out of work. So he returned to the same job he last held in 1998 before becoming the head coach at Ole Miss.

No one can argue that Cutcliffe is a good coordinator and an exceptional quarterbacks coach. But before he re-upped with the Vols, I tried to make a case for going in a different direction for a couple of reasons.

First, I thought it was an opportunity to bring in a creative new coach with innovative ideas. Second, I wondered how long Cutcliffe would stay, since he made no secret of his ambition to become a head coach again.

In retrospect, Cutcliffe probably saved Fulmer's job. He improved the offense over a disastrous 2005 season and worked wonders with quarterback Erik Ainge, who needed a strong-willed, detail-oriented position coach. In fact, Cutcliffe seemed to bring much-needed discipline to the entire offense over which he obviously had more control than his successor.

Nonetheless, I wonder what would have happened if Fulmer had hired a hotshot coordinator "outside the family" and given him the leeway to run his offense, whatever that might have been.

I'm not saying UT's system is broken. I'm just saying it's not nearly as efficient as other systems.

If you have the best players, you can make any system work. UT had the best players in the mid to late 1990s. It doesn't now.

And it certainly doesn't have the best system.

UT hasn't led the SEC in total offense since 1997. It hasn't led the SEC in rushing since 1999.

In Sanders' last two years as offensive coordinator, UT ranked fourth and eighth in the SEC in total offense. In Cutcliffe's two years as offensive coordinator, it has ranked sixth and fifth.

You can't measure Cutcliffe's contributions solely in yards. He's a recruiting magnet for quarterbacks.

Terrelle Pryor of Jeannette, Pa., is regarded as the top quarterback prospect in the country this year. Most of his favored schools run some version of the spread option, which he runs in high school. UT also was on his short list because of Cutcliffe, who coached both Peyton and Eli Manning in college.

Oregon is one of the schools on Pryor's list. And maybe its coordinator, Chip Kelly, should be on UT's list. Kelly, 43, was a longtime coordinator at the University of New Hampshire before taking charge of the spread option offense at Oregon, which was just about unstoppable until quarterback Dennis Dixon was injured.

If I were in the market for a coordinator, I would take a long look at Georgia Southern head coach Chris Hatcher and Tulsa offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn.

Hatcher, 34, won a Division II national championship and 86.4 percent of his games at his alma mater, Valdosta State, before taking over at Georgia Southern this season. The Eagles improved from 3-8 last season to 7-4 this year under Hatcher, who is well versed in the spread option but also has been exposed to other systems. He was a quarterbacks coach under Hal Mumme at Kentucky and was a quarterbacks coach at UCF when Daunte Culpepper was the quarterback.

Hatcher already is drawing attention as a head-coaching candidate at bigger schools, so maybe he wouldn't be interested in a coordinator's job. But he's worth calling, just in case.

So is the 42-year-old Malzahn, who wrote a book on his fast-paced no-huddle offense while he was still a high school coach in Springdale, Ark. In a turbulent 2006 season as Arkansas' offensive coordinator, Malzahn made improvements despite the resistance of then-head coach Houston Nutt. This year, as Tulsa's offensive coordinator, Malzahn's team leads the nation in total offense.

None of those coaches has a UT connection. They don't know the system.

But they know offense.

Sports editor John Adams may be reached at 865-342-6284 or adamsj@knews.com.