KNOXVILLE -- The selection of Kurt Roper to join his Tennessee staff was, no doubt, Phillip Fulmer's decision -- albeit in consultation with new Associate coach David Cutcliffe who knew Roper best. However, Roper was far from Fulmer's first choice. After failing to land Kippy Brown or any other top-flight coach in the NFL or from another major college program and after being turned down by a few others, there really was no one else who wanted to come to Tennessee. Why has a job on this staff become so unattractive to a quality assistant coach?


Fulmer seems to feel that Roper can contribute to the success of the Vols, despite hiring him from perhaps the worst staff in the Southeastern Conference at Kentucky. Time will tell if this is true, but he appears to be another in a long line of hires that Fulmer has made of coaches with weak resumes and limited experience in achieving championship results at the big-time college football level. Roper's only strength seems to be that he brings youth to the staff to better attract recruits.

Look for Georgia's Mark Richt to make a strong play to hire Trooper Taylor, once recruiting season is over. Many well-heeled Georgia alumni, who are supplementing Rodney Garner's salary with the Bulldogs with private money, have been urging Richt to go after Taylor -- a good recruiter and a good friend of Garner's. Richt has resisted doing so at this time, due to ethical considerations, but once signing day is over this is a move that may definitely be made -- especially due to the lack of running game production that Georgia had from its current running backs coach this year. Will UT up the ante to keep Trooper? Larry Slade has been rumored for months to be retiring after recruiting season is done, as well, and reportedly told some of his defensive backs that Kentucky would be his last game on the Vol staff.

It appears that the reshuffling of the staff will include Taylor moving from running backs coach to wide receivers coach, if he stays, and that Roper will coach the running backs. Trooper appears happy with the move, and apparently Fulmer hopes he can motivate the receivers to do a far better job than they did under Pat Washington.

In the meantime, it appears Tennessee is heading toward its worst recruiting year in Fulmer's career. Unless he has a lot of silent commitments in his hip pocket, he will have to have the strongest closing of any recruiting season in his career to avoid being out of the Top 15 nationally in terms of talent signed -- the first time that has come close to happening since he has been head coach. This would be a crushing blow to a coach who directs so much of his year-round efforts toward that aspect of his job and is considered by his peers to be, perhaps, the best recruiter of any head coach in America.

Fulmer has hired former quarterback Rick Clausen, who nearly quit the team last season and has several public rifts with Fulmer in the media, as one of UT's new graduate assistants. This, apparently, is a reward to the Clausen family for giving the Tennessee family two of their sons and it may also be to give Tennessee a chance to salvage the recruiting of Jimmy Clausen, the last of the Clausen clan from California. Fulmer, obviously, realizes that there have been some problems with the recruiting of quarterbacks of late, as the last few have not panned out as planned (James Banks and Brent Schaeffer, in particular). Without a proven QB in camp as spring practice rolls around, this is a critical need that may again go unfilled with top talent. By the way, Clausen replaces former Vol Jay Graham, a graduate assistant in 2005, who has been hired as an assistant coach at UT-Chattanooga.

Fulmer does not appear to realize that 2006 is a watershed year for his career. From his recent comments to the media, he appears to believe the 2005 season made him the victim of the "Perfect Storm". He had the audacity to ask UT athletic director Mike Hamilton for a contract extension, despite turning in a losing record with some of the best playing talent in college football, resulting in the worst flop of any program nationally. He did not want to fire Jimmy Ray Stephens as offensive line coach, mainly because Stephens was coaching as Fulmer had instructed him to do.

Fulmer has indicated his lack of insight as to his own program's problems. He has repeatedly rejected the advice of many of his good friends, who have been telling him for several years that the program was on a downhill slide. To be truthful, he's been told his assistant coaches were not serving his best interests. His assistants, however, were generally coaching exactly as Fulmer directed and approved. Mike Barry, who has two National Championship rings from two separate major universities, was perhaps the only assistant Fulmer has ever hired who ever disagreed with him, and he got fired as a result of it.

The big question to be answered in 2006 is whether the Volunteers can go from such a low level of production in 2005 to a level acceptable to its boosters and supporters in just one year. Settling for Kurt Roper appears to indicate that Fulmer still does not smell the coffee, and that he may be the one on the ropes himself and may not know it. After being turned down by several others, he was desperate to get a new wide receivers coach in place in order to salvage recruiting before it was too late.

All of the coaching moves that have been made at UT in this off-season have been in consultation with newly-rehired Assistant Head Coach and Offensive Coordinator David Cutcliffe. In fact, it might be argued that Cutcliffe has made all of the new hires himself, instead of Fulmer. So does the blame or credit for Roper's hiring really go to Fulmer or Cutcliffe? It is an open question as to whether Cutcliffe can steer the Big Orange ship back to prosperous times.

Roper, who coached under Cutcliffe for the entire time Cutcliffe was head coach at Ole Miss, was hired in his first full-time job after having been a graduate assistant with Cutcliffe under Fulmer at Tennessee in the late 1990s. He spent last year at Kentucky and all of his experience is in coaching quarterbacks, with the exception of prior time at UT, when he worked with defense and special teams. He is the son of longtime football assistant Bobby Roper, a star player at Arkansas in the 1960s who came to Tennessee from Iowa State and Pittsburgh with Johnny Majors in 1977. He later moved to Oregon State and other stops in the 1980s.

The entire UT administration, from president John Peterson and athletic director Mike Hamilton on down, needs to understand that 2006 is as serious as a heart attack for the athletic department. Donors will not allow their grandiose athletic projects to die on the vine. Hamilton, to his credit, appears he will do whatever he has to do with Fulmer, if for no other reason but to save his own job.

Hamilton has proven that he can take the heat from some well-heeled alumni who wanted to give Buzz Peterson another year as men's basketball coach and his hiring of Bruce Pearl for that position has given him a lot of political capital to spend, but he must do so wisely. There are a lot of people who give a lot of money to the UT, which has one of the nation's largest athletic budgets at $70 million annually. But they can and will withhold those donations in a New York minute if the football program doesn't make massive improvements this year.

One final note: Some strong rumors going around Cherokee Country Club, on the banks of the Tennessee River and Fort Loudon Lake in Knoxville these days are that Jim Haslam is preparing to buy the Tennessee Titans' NFL franchise from owner Bud Adams. This appears to be a move toward developing more of a political power base in Nashville, as Bill Haslam prepares to move from being Knoxville's mayor to running for governor once Phil Bredesen's second term is up. The torch appears to be being passed from Haslam to John "Thunder" Thornton as Tennessee's most powerful booster. Thornton was named one of the Top 10 college football boosters nationally this past week by ESPN.