Rusty Wright knew that the first few months of his tenure as University of Tennessee at Chattanooga head football coach would be the most tumultuous. Or maybe he hoped that would be the case.
But after being hired in December of 2018, Wright likely now longs for the times that a flooded practice field was the biggest of his issues.
When UTC and Wright had to part ways with offensive line coach Chris Malone recently, it was just the latest chapter in what has been quite the ride to date.
The Mocs finished 6-6 in Wright’s first season as head coach at his alma mater in 2019, which feels like it happened about four years ago. Prior to spring practice starting in 2020, COVID-19 shut down sports across the country, preventing UTC from having what would have been the program’s first normal spring practice under Wright.
If that wasn’t enough, the pandemic ultimately altered the 2020 fall football season, turning what was expected to be an 11-game slate into an eight-game spring schedule, with the Mocs currently scheduled to face Virginia Military Institute on Feb. 20 at home.
But what is home? UTC has been working on figuring that out, for at least the first two home games as Finley Stadium typically doesn’t turn water on at the facility until mid-March in a cost-cutting measure because of course, Finley doesn’t typically need to have its facility ready until mid-spring for spring practice.
(To be clear, there’s no blame – either for UTC or Finley’s side. The spring season has just affected everything in terms of normalcy.)
The Mocs will start this spring schedule having played one game, a 13-10 loss to Western Kentucky on Oct. 24. Time will tell how many more get played.
“It hasn’t been dull, to say the least,” Wright said recently about his tenure. “I have a vested interest in this place being well, but it hasn’t been dull. It’s about every six months that something pops up, but I was told a long time ago that if you want to sit in that chair, you have to take the good days with the bad days and balance them both and hopefully there’s more good days down the road.
“I get paid to graduate kids and win football games. Who has it better than me?”
His latest project is finding a replacement for Malone, who stepped down earlier this month after one of his Twitter posts – which attacked Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams – created a firestorm.
Wright has already had to make two defensive line hires since he took over, as Landius Wilkerson left recently to assume the same position at South Alabama. Wilkerson had been the replacement for Kenny Baker, Wright’s first hire that left after the 2019 season to go to Western Kentucky. His position was filled by former Moc Nick Davidson.
Wright, who has been vocal about not wanting a spring season to happen, admitted last week that he had to “change his mindset” in terms of the possibility. His prior reasoning had a lot to do with squaring his focus on the fall season, which still has to be played. But now the reality is that there will be some semblance of a season this spring, and it’s up to Wright and staff to best navigate that.
Even as concerns – such as the possibility of playing at least 19 games this calendar year – still remain.
“I’ve had to try to look at it from a different picture of getting guys ready in different ways,” Wright said. “It hinders us some because we’ve got young guys in this program that have not been through a true spring yet and if you’re not careful, we can hurt programs for a long period of time and that is a huge, huge concern of mine.
“But I’m hoping what we’re doing is giving them a chance to be successful somehow, someway. We can’t make up that time, but we’ve got to figure out a way to manufacture time in different ways of doing things. You can’t get better lifting weights if you’re practicing football and you can’t get better practicing football if you’re lifting weights, so we’ve got to try to balance that and figure out what works for us and what works for us may be different for someone else, but it’s an interesting time for sure.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.