David Blackburn Resignation Shows How the Tennessee Volunteers Often Cannibalize Local Mid-Majors.
The question surrounding David Blackburn resigning as athletic director at Chattanooga is “why?”
He had just hired new football and basketball coaches. The Mocs basketball program may be rebuilding, but the brand suggests they will be strong.
It’s a good athletic program. They wouldn’t be the Bucs rival if they weren’t.
But a column by the Chattanooga Times Free Press Mark Weidmer (how come the Tri-Cities can’t have a newspaper columnist like that?) paints a disturbing picture. He resigned due to a broken heart.
Or because he hiked his skirt to the Tennessee Volunteers, but the Big Orange looked elsewhere for their new athletic director.
I’ve spoken of the “Tennessee rumor.” It’s the rumor that is sensationally optimistic about the Vols, speaks of naivete and never comes true.
“Jon Gruden is going to be the coach,” for instance.
Blackburn is a victim of this mindset. Vols fans speculate when Dave Hart retires who will replace him. Athletic administrators aren’t as well known as coaches, so such speculation will naturally lead to considering a former UT-K administrator doing good things at UT-C.
The problem is UT-C is considered minor league by UT-K.
New Vols AD John Currie wasn’t in the public mindset because he was no longer local, working in Manhattan, Kansas. But he was a former UT athletic administrator, just like Blackburn, and had experience with bigger budgets, major coaching hires, and more extensive media coverage and fan support at Kansas State. Currie had the superior resume.
Still, what made Blackburn’s final months as the athletic director at Chattanooga so disturbing is his open campaigning for the job. Weidmer, the aforementioned Chattanooga columnist, wrote of Blackburn scorning his own school’s Chattanooga-Citadel football game that would likely decide the Southern Conference championship to glad hand at the Tennessee-Alabama game.
Though Blackburn denies the allegation, he definitely wasn’t at his team’s biggest football game of the year.
I’m reminded of Donald Sterling fooling around with V Stiviano while married to Shelly. How’d that work out for him?
It didn’t work out well for Blackburn, either. And that act may have triggered former football coach Russ Huesnmen’s departure to Richmond, which has the feel of a lateral move at best.
I can appreciate someone wishing to rise up the latter, so to speak. More money, more exposure, in Blackburn’s returning to where your career started.
But I also understand the need for tact. Frankly, Blackburn’s actions made Chattanooga, a viable Division I athletic program and the big league team in a city of some size, look second-rate.
Heck, Chattanooga even beat Tennessee this year on the hardwood. Shouldn’t the Mocs athletic director be working to make sure his current program continues to have a better basketball program than his larger rival instead of sending proverbial flowers and boxes of candy to that rival?
So Blackburn is out at Chattanooga after a very fine run. Can Chattanooga continue their success?
Possibly, but in order to do so the new hire will have to remain focused on his own job instead of hiking his skirt to other schools he perceives as more glamorous.
