Tennessee fired Butch Jones, so the Vols are in the market for a new football coach. Athletic director John Currie had a press conference to talk about Jones’ firing and his nascent coach search on Sunday. Someone asked him about Jon Gruden, the Super Bowl-winning coach and Monday Night Football analyst who’s been linked on and off to the Tennessee job since 2008 but never shown anything like serious interest.

Here’s how that went:

Currie was asked about Gruden. He dodged, but LOOK AT THAT SMILE! pic.twitter.com/00sV2C4Ot0 — RockyTopTalk (@RockyTopTalk) November 12, 2017

A reporter asked Currie if he wanted to say anything to Tennessee fans about Gruden. It was a pretty open-ended question, and Currie responded after a little grin, “I will not be making any kind of comments or responses to specific candidates or specific rumors.”

This is going to be the grin heard ‘round the world.

That’s because UT fans are somewhere between fascinated and obsessed with the idea of Gruden become their football coach. That’s been the situation for years.

Terry Lambert, the editor of SB Nation’s Tennessee blog, Rocky Top Talk (which maintains an extensive timeline of years and years of GRUMORS), gave me some interesting details from inside the Vols’ fan base. “Alabama, Tennessee's biggest rival, returned to powerhouse status with one single home run hire,” Lambert told me. “Tennessee has gotten it wrong three straight times. Fans are craving that ‘Saban moment’ hire. A lot of fans believe Jon Gruden is Tennessee's Saban. “The Gruden-UT connections are obvious. Fans know that Tennessee has the money and boosters to make it happen. They just want to see the school swing for the fences, for once.”

(The Gruden-UT connections are that Gruden was a graduate assistant there in the 1980s and that his wife was a cheerleader there. He hasn’t coached college football in decades and has suggested he’s not interested in doing it again.

But!

Yes,” Lambert said. “Look, he's never [been a head coach] in college. He's never recruited. He's been out of the coaching game for a decade. I get all of that. “But does anyone really think that Jon Gruden would struggle to pull talent to Knoxville? I think he'd kill it in that area. I'd guess he'd assemble a pretty potent staff, too. When you stack all of these candidates up, nobody really moves the needle for me like Gruden does.”

I look forward to the continuation of this Gruden-Tennessee news cycle.

My assumption is everyone will be level-headed and realistic in their expectations of whom Tennessee hires next, and nobody will be sad about it when it’s not Gruden.