HATTIESBURG, Miss. — You’ve got to go back almost two decades to find a stretch of comparable success for University of Tennessee athletics, back to the last SEC East title for Phillip Fulmer and his football Vols (2007), Pat Summitt’s run with Candace Parker (back-to-back NCAA champs in 2007-08), Luke Hochevar and a College World Series advance (2005), Bruce Pearl, yearly softball success from the Weeklys and high approval for then-AD Mike Hamilton.
Karen Weekly and UT softball, fresh off a Women’s College World Series run, have been crushing it all along. Every other listed sport and job endured failure on a scale from “incompetence” to “embarrassment so acute it should never be discussed again,” from the late 2000s to the early 2020s. But now everything is in place, much of it pre-dating AD Danny White but all of it tied together in his two and a half years.
White came in known as a coach finder and revenue driver. He hasn’t done much of the former yet, though Josh Heupel looms large as his football choice and Duane Ross is a promising director of track and field. White is all over the latter in an effort to push UT’s athletic budget from the $150 million range he inherited to the $200 million range of a select few. That’s the neighborhood UT occupied…
