Tennessee is pretty sneaky these days and made a very quiet trip to Utah last night and offered Utah's Kyle Whittingham a reported $3 to $4 million to go to Tennessee, but this morning Whittingham declined the offer. That salary would triple his current base at $1.2 million, but as Whittingham's daughter said via her twitter account: "money isn't everything."
Whittingham joins Air Force's Troy Calhoun to turn down Tennessee and the might SEC. This just reaffirms that these coaches for one really enjoy their university as Calhoun is a graduate of the Academy and Whittingham has been in Utah ever since his playing days in the mid 80's at BYU.
There has been some speculation that the reasons these coaches are turning down Tennessee is because of the many secondary violations that Lane Kiffin left behind; I doubt that is the case. Look more to the pressure that goes on in the SEC and the riots that occurred just after Lane Kiffin left town as better reasons to not go there.
This just affirms that these coaches in the Mountain West are not going to up and leave -- well unless their dream job opens up -- for the first BCS job that opens up their wallets. So, it looks like the Mountain West escaped this off season without losing any coaches to a BCS league.
As for the Tennessee coaching search it looks as if the found their man after whiffing on Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, Air Force coach Troy Calhoun, Duke coach David Cutcliffe former NFL coach Jon Gruden,and Utah's Kyle Whittingham in the long list of people who turned the job down. The coach the Vols possibly have landed is Louisiana Tech's David Dooley (who!). Well, he was the recruiting coordinator/running backs coach under Nick Saban at LSU from 2000 to 2004 where they landed a pair of number one rated classes.