Tennessee Volunteers head baseball coach Tony Vitello watches the football game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the UAB Blazers during the second quarter at Neyland Stadium. Randy Sartin / Imagn Images

Pat Murphy participated in the phone interview from a Chick-Fil-A drive-thru with his kids in the back seat.

Less than a week had passed since the Milwaukee Brewers, who owned the National League's best record in the regular season, were eliminated in the NL Championship Series. But there was no downtime as media requests continued to buzz on Murphy's phone. When you are the only current major-league manager who has served as a Division-I head coach, and when the San Francisco Giants just upended the baseball world while becoming the first team in more than a century to hire a major-league manager straight off a college campus, people want your opinion about more than honey mustard vs. garden herb ranch.

"Everybody's asking me about it," said Murphy, two days after the Giants announced the hiring of University of Tennessee head coach Tony Vitello on Oct. 22. "The bottom line is, I would have never been ready coming out of college. I would have never been ready for the big leagues right away."

Murphy was quick to qualify: The 66-year-old baseball lifer can only speak to his own path, in which he followed 22 seasons as head coach at Notre Dame and Arizona State with a pro career that included 14 years as a special assistant, minor-league manager, interim major-league manager and major-league bench coach with the San Diego Padres and Brewers.

Maybe others will call Vitello, 47, a risky hire or will predict choppy seas. Murphy won't be one of them. That's because Murphy believes in the person who's doing the hiring.

"Buster Posey is thoughtful," Murphy said of the Giants' former All-Star catcher and president of baseball operations. "He understands the transition. I just believe that he has thought through all of this, and the qualities that Tony has. He's going to support the rest of it, whatever the rest of it is. Different people take a different length of time to adjust. It was a big adjustment for me at the big-league (level). But Tony, it might not be a big adjustment. He's obviously terrific at what he does, and his communication skills and ability to relate to players will translate.

"I think it's a great move. I think Buster Posey is trying to get it right and not just following normal patterns."

Posey has the luxury to disregard normal patterns. His stature within the game and his franchise is unique. He is more than one of the most popular, marketable and accomplished players in Giants history. He's also a minority owner who sits on the executive board. He might be the only chief baseball executive with the personal capital to make such an out-of-the-box hire.

Here's the thing: That capital is at least partially transferable. In addition to everything Vitello achieved while turning Tennessee into a national powerhouse over the past eight seasons, he will receive instant credibility -- from Murphy and many others -- because of the man who hired him.

"I've never met the guy," Murphy said of Posey. "I just trust him (because of his) temperament, the way he played. I thought he was one of the most underrated players in baseball for a long time, what he did behind the dish and what he did offensively. He was a great example of, for me, an impact player -- a huge impact. I think people who were around him and his teammates would say the same.

"Yeah, I just think they've thought through all this. They know what they're doing."

But "Trust Buster" had its limits even for Teddy Roosevelt. The Giants are sure to experience challenges along the way. Any franchise would when it falls under the leadership of a manager with no professional playing or coaching experience and a top baseball executive who just completed his first year on the job.

The 162-game schedule is the most obvious and practical adjustment that Vitello will have to make.

When the Volunteers won the College World Series in 2024, they also became the first Division-I team in 22 years to win 60 games. The Southeastern Conference schedule is a 30-game snack compared to the everyday, six-month grind of a major-league season. For Murphy, who served as the Padres' interim manager after Bud Black was fired in June 2015, the adjustment was about more than managing the finite resources of a pitching staff and workloads for position players.

"I just had no idea of the pace of it," Murphy said. "It's like a harness race (versus) a thoroughbred race. There's a lot of similarities. The outcome is the same -- the win, the loss. But it's the difference between harness racing and thoroughbred racing, it just takes you a while to adjust and to get the pace. And in college, you're not going after a game and dealing with a front office. You meet with the team and you're done. You don't have somebody sitting in the office talking through this and that and the other thing. So that's much different that way."

For longtime Princeton head coach Scott Bradley, who was the Seattle Mariners' starting catcher from 1987-91, there's no comparing the workload and lifestyle between college and the major leagues.

"It's such a different concept of the game," Bradley said in a phone interview before the Vitello hiring was announced. "You lose a midweek game to a non-ranked team, and it kills your RPI (Rating Percentage Index). It's not like losing to the last-place team in the big leagues."

In other words, you can't manage to win every game at all costs. That was one of the tougher lessons that Murphy took from his interim stint in 2015.

Learning to delegate was another.

"I always felt in coaching that I could do it on my own, and you can't," Murphy said. "You need your staff, and you need a great staff. And I didn't know how to employ all that. I didn't know how to get that right. I thought I had to coach everything and prove it to everyone."

Murphy inherited his staff when he piloted the Padres to the end of the 2015 season. Vitello will be able to form his own group in consultation with the front office. It'll surprise nobody if he reunites with Jayce Tingler, his former University of Missouri teammate who served as the Minnesota Twins' bench coach the past four seasons and managed the Padres in 2020-21.

Giants pitching coach J.P. Martinez has another year on his contract. He offers familiarity and continuity with what might be Vitello's biggest area of adjustment, and is said to be eager to return.

The Giants would do themselves a favor if they could entice former first-base coach Antoan Richardson into returning to San Francisco, possibly for a promotion to associate manager. Richardson, who reached a salary impasse with the New York Mets, was largely responsible for a team that posted the second-most baserunning runs created despite the lowest average sprint speed in the major leagues last season. Those are skills that are action items for the Giants, who finished 28th in baserunning runs created and have the fewest steals since 2023, when MLB tweaked rules to incentivize more risk-taking on the bases.

It'll be important that the Giants retain Spanish-speaking coaches on their staff, too. In addition to never coaching pro players, Vitello has no experience coaching athletes from Latin American backgrounds. So it's perhaps notable that hitting coach Oscar Bernard, who hails from the Dominican Republic, also has one year remaining on his contract.

Here's one area where Vitello probably has an advantage over a college coach who attempted to make this jump a decade earlier: interfacing with the analytics staff should be no problem whatsoever.

"I was shocked when I came back to college and what we've developed," said University of Arizona coach Chip Hale, who managed the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2015-16. "One of our first kids who was our analytics manager got a full-time job with the Diamondbacks. I told our players, 'This guy will be in the big leagues before you guys.' He runs all their models. The stuff we get from our group is amazing, and the scouting, it's totally different than when I was in college. It's a big-league scouting report now. So that gap has closed."

For Murphy, the adjustment to major-league manager went beyond delegating authority to his staff or making sense of the never-ending stream of data. It was coming to terms with a general lack of control.

"I didn't understand that the manager isn't the end-all to the win and the loss," Murphy said. "Because in college, you kind of feel like you control a lot. In Major League Baseball, you have a role, but you can't dictate the outcome of the game very often. You do have an input on it, but you don't take the wins and losses very often."

A major-league manager's limited control of game-level strategy might be one of the reasons that baseball hasn't mirrored the NFL or NBA, where it's common for franchises to hire coaches from high-achieving NCAA programs. For every Pete Carroll who leads the Seattle Seahawks to the Super Bowl, there's a Chip Kelly and an Urban Meyer who fail to make a successful transition. The common thread behind those coaches is that they were all seen as innovators when it came to Xs and Os. They were hired for their ability to draw up a scheme.

The value that Vitello creates for Tennessee is not replicated in MLB the same way that it is for the NFL and NBA because scheme doesn't matter so much. Game management is less dynamic in baseball. And you're not directly involved in drafting or talent acquisition, so being a tremendous recruiter doesn't make nearly as much of an impact.

Posey didn't merely demonstrate an openness to consider Division-I head coaches as managerial candidates. He demonstrated that he was willing to pay what it required to hire away one of the highest-salaried college coaches in the game. And that meant making Vitello one of the best-compensated major-league managers with entry-level pro experience. Vitello signed a three-year contract with a vesting fourth-year option that will pay him $3.5 million per season -- a modest bump from the $3 million he was making at Tennessee.

And that brings up one more issue that this hiring creates: making enemies.

Vitello's teams at Tennessee played with an audacious, bat-flipping intensity that didn't always sit well with opponents. That intensity is bound to get turned down a notch in the big leagues. But for some within the game, it will be unsettling enough just to see Vitello holding up a Giants jersey and signing a contract that will pay him more than most of his managerial cohort.

There will be a perception among some that he hasn't paid his dues.

Bradley, asked earlier this month about the concept of college coaches as managerial candidates, admitted that he laughed the first time he heard that Vitello could be on the Giants' radar.

"There's so many guys that have played professional baseball that put in the time, know the lifestyle, that have worked in these organizations," said Bradley, who cited one of his former Princeton players, Will Venable. "Look at Will's path: played close to 10 years, successful player, went to work for the Cubs as first-base coach, as baserunning coach, then bench coach (in Boston) for (Alex) Cora, then he came to Texas to be bench coach for Bruce Bochy. You're talking about learning the craft and being in meetings with players, finding out what it's all about. Then after all that, you get a chance to go to the White Sox and manage.

"That's been the path for a lot of these guys. There's so many qualified guys on the cusp of organizations that they need to grow with them. Now you're seeing some major-league players like (Cleveland's) Stephen Vogt getting a chance to manage right away, which is good, because those guys have done well. I just think baseball guys are baseball guys. But to me, it's a completely different animal when you're dealing with 162 games and veterans who don't live and die with every game."

Petty jealousies might be expressed. In some corners, the Giants might become the most hated team in the league -- or they might not. But external perceptions only matter so much. Clearly, to Posey, they don't matter much at all.

Vitello will begin the job in San Francisco with something significant that even his predecessor, three-time Manager of the Year Bob Melvin, did not possess: The current guy in charge is the guy who hired him. And nobody outside of Buster Posey is going to fire Buster Posey.

"Just look at the Diamondbacks," Hale said. "Torey (Lovullo) replaced me, and he's still there. He and the GM (Mike Hazen) came in together and he's been loyal to him. If you're hired by the person calling the shots, if you're his guy, that's so important. Things have a tendency to go comfortable and go smooth."

But nothing is guaranteed. The entire industry is curious about how this experiment will play out. Even Posey's predecessor, former Giants GM Brian Sabean, acknowledged before Vitello's hiring that he couldn't be sure.

"That's a great flag to be planted, but do I know or think the sport is ready for people right out of college?" said Sabean, who started his baseball career as the head coach at Eckerd College in Florida. "I don't know. Without experiencing minor-league baseball or professional baseball, with the schedule and the nature of the calendar, you're a world away.

"Is it possible? In these times, sure. I guess bring in the best candidates on your list and see where it falls. But having said that, I don't know."

New Giants manager Tony Vitello has a unique advantage as he makes a historic transition