On Sunday, news broke that Tennessee was going to hire Ohio State DC Greg Schiano to be the Vols’ next head coach. However, that quickly fell apart as fans decided to protest AD John Currie’s decision.

Eventually, the deal fell apart and now Tennessee is going back to the drawing board with its coaching search.

During his Monday morning appearance on “The Opening Drive” on WJOX, ESPN host Paul Finebaum called out Currie for his handling of the situation that has developed over the past couple of days.

Though Vol Nation showed up in force to protest the news of the Schiano hiring, Finebaum said there comes a point where Currie needs to stand strong and do his job.

However, he added that there were many steps Currie could have (and should have) taken to prevent such a mess in the first place:

“I’m really conflicted by this,” he said. “I’m probably the biggest advocate in the country for fans having a voice. My whole career in radio has been giving folks the opportunity to speak. But I think there comes a point when the athletic director has to take charge. The biggest fault I find in John Currie is that he didn’t do his homework. Not only did he let Butch Jones linger there for way too long, which may or may not have distracted the search (I think it did), he didn’t have a search firm, which you can argue if it’s worth the $50,000 or $100,000, but in this case it would have been. Quite frankly, all he had to do was use Google. On the way home one night, just type in Greg Schiano’s name and you would have found everything you needed to know that could have been red flags.

“I don’t know Greg Schiano. I know people that will swear by him and I know people that are troubled by the allegations. I tend to think it’s probably a little bit of a stretch to link him to this case, although I understand the frustration on the other side of it.”

Finebaum continued, adding that the way Currie got to the point where Schiano was the best choice was embarrassing for the university:

“To get to this point, to shoot blanks on Jon Gruden, which we all knew he would, to hang around for three days waiting for Dan Mullen to get the call from Scott Stricklin. And then, to use as your third or fourth or fifth choice without doing proper vetting is an embarrassment.”

Will Currie be able to keep his job amid the mess he’s created? Right now, it’s not looking good for the suddenly embattled athletic director.