As the football coach at Tennessee, it often seemed like Derek Dooley was in the wrong business.
Sure, he had the right surname and the right resumé to be a head coach in the Southeastern Conference, thanks mostly to his father Vince, who led Georgia to the national championship in 1980 and whose influence reached across a wide swath of college football.
But when it came time to actually do the job, Derek Dooley – with his coiffed side part, fancy law degree and University of Virginia education – often seemed as if he was cosplaying the role, like he would have fit in better as a professor, an attorney or perhaps even future politician.
“Right now we’re like the Germans in World War II,” Dooley said in 2010 as he descended into an infamous soliloquy comparing Tennessee’s 2-5 record to the confusion of Nazi forces as the Battle of Normandy began with commanding field marshall Erwin Rommel back in Germany visiting his wife. “Here comes the boats, it’s coming, the binoculars like, ‘Oh my god, the invasion is coming.’ That’s what they did. They were in the bunkers. ‘It’s coming.’ They call Rommel. They can’t find Rommel. ‘What do we do? I’m not doing anything until I get orders. Have you gotten Rommel yet?’ And the Americans were the exact opposite.”
After that rant, and a few others that went viral for their sheer weirdness, you can understand why a group of young football players didn’t respond to him. Dooley was fired after three seasons and a 4-19 SEC record, his legendary incompetence dragging Tennessee’s proud program into a cycle of dysfunction that would last nearly a decade.
Now he’s got a new job that always made a lot more sense: Running for Senate.
This is not a column about Dooley’s politics, which in fact we know very little about other than he’s running as a Republican and has a lifelong friendship with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who encouraged him to get in the race. It is also not a column about the viability of his candidacy, either in a primary field or against Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff.
That’s for voters to decide. We’ll see how that all plays out over the next year. And, at least in Georgia, we have a recent example of an actual Bulldogs legend in Herschel Walker losing a statewide race.
Dooley, if he’s remembered for anything in Georgia, it’s as the coach who had 13 men on the field for LSU’s final snap from the 1-yard line in 2010, handing the Tigers the one extra chance they needed to win.
Out-mangling Les Miles at the end of a game? Now that takes some talent.
The point is this: Whereas sports people from Jack Kemp to Tom Osborne to Tommy Tuberville often leverage their athletic or coaching success into political gravitas, it is the fact that Dooley never belonged on a college sideline in the first place that makes his Senate run seem plausible.
How bad was it? He was the first Tennessee coach to lose to Kentucky in 27 years. He lost to Vanderbilt by 23 points, the worst margin in that rivalry since 1954. He was the first Tennessee coach to suffer three consecutive losing seasons since 1909-11. And In Dooley’s 2012 recruiting class, he didn’t sign a single offensive lineman. Not one. For an SEC program, it’s unheard of.
The Vols paid for that mistake for many years to come. It was one of the most disastrous coaching tenures in SEC history.
Yet anyone who has been around or interacted with Dooley understands he’s a man of high intelligence, with a heavyweight education to back it up. He speaks in coherent sentences. He knows history, as he demonstrated with the World War II analogy. He even knows a little bit about infectious diseases, as he revealed in another of his greatest hits.
“We have a few staph infections, so we did a clinic yesterday on proper shower technique and soap and using a rag,” he once told the media. “Y’all think I’m kidding. I’m serious. We have the worst shower discipline of any team I’ve ever been around, so we talked about application of soap to the rag and making sure you hit all your body. You can neglect it trying to cut corners and it shows in how you practice and elsewhere.”
It’s a fair point to make. But as with so many of these Dooley tangents that made him the butt of jokes around the SEC, his instinct to show the world he was the smartest guy in the room would have been more useful coaching Tennessee’s debate team than its football program.
Still, it’s hard to say Dooley made the wrong choice when he left a prestigious Atlanta law firm in 1996 to join the family business. As successful as he probably would have been in any other field, Tennessee paid him $5 million just to go away.
Dooley never seemed like he belonged in the SEC, but now he’s reemerged to test the theory he’ll be more adept at a different bare-knuckle sport than the one that takes place on Saturdays in the fall. We’ll see soon whether Georgia voters agree or Dooley’s home state puts one more L on his resumé.