KNOXVILLE (AP) — Tennessee fired coach Butch Jones on Sunday with two games left in a regular season in which the Volunteers started ranked but are now still winless in the Southeastern Conference.
Vols athletic director John Currie said defensive line coach Brady Hoke would serve as interim head coach for the remainder of the season. The move has seemed almost inevitable for weeks.
"Unfortunately, we are not where we need to be competitively," Currie said in a statement. "For that reason, I have asked Coach Jones to step down as head football coach. I know Coach Jones will be successful moving forward, and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors."
Jones went 34-27 overall and 14-24 in the SEC over five seasons. He led the Vols to bowl victories each of the last three years before the program took a giant step backward this fall.
Tennessee (4-6, 0-6 SEC) has dropped five of its last six games, including a 50-17 loss to Missouri on Saturday.
Jones was making $4.1 million annually and has a contract that runs through Feb. 28, 2021. His buyout states that if he's fired without cause, Tennessee would owe him over $8 million. That figure could be mitigated if he does land another position.
Jones inherited a program that had posted three straight losing seasons under coach Derek Dooley. The Vols went 5-7 for a fourth straight losing season in Jones' debut year but followed that up by going 7-6 in 2014 and posting consecutive 9-4 finishes the last two years.
Jones restocked the talent base by upgrading Tennessee's recruiting, but he couldn't get the Vols an SEC East title even during an era when rivals Florida and Georgia have been in transition.
Tennessee hasn't reached the SEC championship game since 2007 and hasn't won a conference title since its 1998 national championship season. Tennessee was picked to win the East last year but stumbled after a 5-0 start.
The Vols' late-season fade in 2016 turned up the heat on Jones. But Currie said before the season that he thought Jones had done "a marvelous job" in his first four seasons.
Then everything went south this year.
Tennessee, which opened the season ranked 25th, has lost its first six SEC games by an average margin of 21.2 points. That stretch includes a 41-0 loss to Georgia that marked the Vols' most lopsided home defeat since 1905. One month later, Tennessee lost 29-26 at Kentucky, which represented just the second time the Vols had fallen to the Wildcats in their last 33 meetings.
