Tennessee football lost newly hired cornerbacks coach Michael Hunter Jr. to the NFL, but quickly landed on its feet with the hiring of Derek Jones.
On Thursday, Jones met with the media for the first time. He was asked about his nickname, Cheetah, why he joined the Vols’ staff, his connection with Jim Knowles and more.
Here’s what he said.
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On his nickname, Cheetah
“Well, really, it’s a nickname that came — I actually used to be a pretty fast guy back in the day, but that has evaporated. But when I got to Duke, I’ve always used Cheetah as a coaching phrase. And, David Cutcliffe, who I worked for for 14 years of my career, was very big on us making one-word phrases in coaching. It was back in the era of hurry-up offenses, and he wanted us to be able to coach on the run as opposed to giving dissertations. So Cheetah is a one-word phrase that means a lot of different things, and what it means is key to hip of the defender.
“And you can use it in tackling, you can use it in coverage, you can use it in pursuit. And, when I got to Duke, I think the program had won maybe 10 games in eight years. I had two seniors in my room who had had two 0-11 seasons. So I was trying to find something to give us a brand. Social media was just getting going. It was just Facebook back then. There was no Twitter, there was no TikTok, there was no Instagram. And so I wanted to give my group an identity, and so I came up with Cheetahs.
“And the unique thing about it is a pack of cheetahs is called a coalition, and a coalition is a group. So you look at a secondary, and when you think about it, cheetahs generally hunt alone, but when they do hunt, they will only hunt with their brothers. So that’s the unity piece of it. So I came up with that, started calling my group the Coalition. Twitter came into play a couple of years later, and the rest is history. I became Coach Cheetah.”
On Ty Redmond
“I think any time that you have a chance to coach a player with that amount of potential, you look at every aspect of it, and you look at every aspect in the sense of how you can help him grow. You know, I’m big on coaching, not only on the field, but off the field. I think if you only coach the player, they’ll never reach their full potential. You have to also coach the person. So you coach the person, that’s where the trust is built, and your coaching habits.
“So just getting to know not only him, but all the rest of the guys, and it’s kind of a blank canvas. I’ve had a chance to meet with them twice and just kind of see where the group is and trying to find out where they are individually. And it’s a young group, and he’s a young guy, so really excited about being able to connect with him, get to know him, allow him to get to, uh, know me, and to grow from it.”
On how quickly he got the job after Michael Hunter Jr. left, his prior knowledge of Tennessee
“Well, you know, the first part of the question is, I know an awful lot about Tennessee, because I was a graduate assistant for Coach Cutcliffe when he first left Tennessee. So a lot of the traditions, a lot of the history, the game maxims, just hearing about so much and being on staff with guys like Marion Hobby, you just learned a lot. You know, Coach Cutcliffe talked a lot to Coach Pat Summitt and a lot of the same leadership things. So it was a part of my early DNA. And then being with him at Duke as a full-time coach for twelve years, a lot of the same things. You know, him and Coach Fulmer still interacted a lot and met a lot of people from Tennessee, worked with a lot of people from Tennessee in that regard.
“So understanding it, being an SEC guy, knowing how successful that they had been, that was a huge, huge part of my upbringing in the coaching profession. You look back, and Coach will pull out a binder that he listened to from Johnny Majors. And Coach Majors got a chance to come visit us a couple of different times. So that was a lot of my young foundation in coaching and a lot of the principles that I still use, you know, today. Matter of fact, I taught my guys something this morning that I learned from David Cutcliffe. I don’t know if he learned it from his days at Tennessee, but it’s kind of the carryover.
“And the second part of the question is Coach Knowles and I are really good friends. We worked together for eight years and had been around each other. And when he first came here, him and I were in a little bit of communication and I was really happy for him that he got that job. And actually, when Coach Knowles reached out to me the other day, I was actually at another institution, checking into a hotel, maybe looking into a situation there.
“He and I talked, and he and I talked a little bit more the next day, and he told me, he said, ‘Don’t take the job. You know, we want to work towards this.’ So he and I talked a little bit more, and we were able to get on the phone with Coach Heupel and talk through some things. And again, David Cutcliffe being very instrumental in the process. Coach Heupel having a lot of respect for him, Coach Cutcliffe being on my reference page. Actually, Dr. Kevin White, who was the athletic director at Duke for my twelve years there, is the father of Danny White. I went to school with Michael White, so there was a lot of different connections that made this thing happen really fast.”
On utilizing social media
“I think anytime you take a job, you’ve got to take the job and jump in with both feet. And I’ve been able to use social media over the course of my career in a lot of different ways. In the recruiting process, we don’t get a chance to interact in person with these young men, nowhere near the way that we used to. And so what I do is I use social media to be able to sell myself, to be able to sell the institution that I’m working at, to be able to sell the people that I’m working with and around. And people see that.
“I’ve got a pretty good formula where I get up in the morning, and I put up three quotes generally, and they rotate all day. I’ll generally come back at night and put another one up. But I want people to understand the excitement of Tennessee football, the tradition of Tennessee football. And what it does is, it allows me to reach decision makers, because they can go back and read through my timeline, and they can see the type of person I am. They can see the type of coach I am. They can see my level of intellect. They can see how I interact with my wife and my family, and it gives you a chance to sell yourself before you meet a lot of people.
“Generally, when I walk into a high school, somebody in that high school is already gonna know who I am, and I’ve never met them, and it’s because of social media. So it’s just a tool that has worked for me for a long time. I think when you’re on social media, you have to be consistent, so that’s why you’re seeing all that stuff. And one of the things I found out in my days, people will try to rival you in that aspect, but it’s hard to be creative, for one, and it’s even harder to be creative and consistent, so it’s just another level of competition.”
On what a cornerback is supposed to look like for him
“You know, the number one thing I’m looking for is not physical. I mean, it’s mentality. It’s the mindset of the guy. It’s how competitive is he? Is he a guy that’s gonna be okay when things go bad? How’s he gonna react when adversity hits and all of that? And some of the guys have that naturally, generally, but it’s also something that you have to continue to coach and instill. And from the physical part, you’re just looking for a guy that’s a good football player. You’re looking for a guy that’s agile. You’re looking for a guy that has good ball skills, but you’re looking for a guy that’s competitive. And my job is to be able to look at the group once I get to know them and see who’s good at what.
“A coach’s job is to be able to look at the group that he has and say, ‘How do I coach this guy?’ As opposed to, ‘How do I coach this guy?’ ‘Cause they’re not all the same. Some guys are gonna have talents that others doesn’t have. Some guys may be bigger than some guys. So you’ve got to be able to look at your entire group and say, ‘Okay, what tools do I need to equip this guy with to help him?’ As opposed to, ‘What tools do I need to equip this guy with to help him?’ Because I may have one technique that a bigger guy plays, that a small guy can’t play because he doesn’t have the arm length. Whereas if I’ve got a guy with quicker feet, he can do something that a bigger guy may not be able to do. So I’m excited to be able to get into spring ball, assess these guys, and see what I can do to make all of them better at the craft.”
On being a girl dad
“I’ve got three. Two of them are adults now and kind of living their own life. But my middle one, her name’s Madison, I think she’s kind of been like my agent through this whole thing. She was trying to talk to me last week about, ‘Don’t take this job,’ or, ‘Maybe you should go here, maybe you should do that,’ and really excited to be a part of Knoxville. It’s so funny, she was telling me the other day, because she recently moved back to the Raleigh-Durham area. And I talked to her on the phone recently, briefly the other day, and right before she got off the phone, she was like, ‘Well, and I’m probably moving to Knoxville this year, but I’ll talk to you about that later,’ which I didn’t know that.
“But I think the biggest one and the most exciting one is my baby girl, Brooklyn. She’s a senior in high school, and over the course of the last couple of weeks, it’s really been enlightening to be able to be home and be around her. Because as coaches, we don’t get a chance to be around a lot. So, not having a job at the time and being able to be home and spend time, I’ve been able to kind of help navigate her through the process of choosing a school. And we had a very enlightening moment a few weeks ago. She didn’t get accepted into a school, and she was really in the dumps. She’s never been an athlete, so she doesn’t understand rejection. She’s never had a boyfriend, so she’s never been broken up with, never had her heart broken. She just had this real somber look on her face, and I explained to her that rejection ultimately leads us to where we’re supposed to go. And I talked to her about growing up in South Carolina. I wanted to go to Clemson, and that was my dream. I saved all the letters Clemson sent me. I knew all of their players. I had all the stuff on the wall. But Clemson didn’t initially offer me a scholarship, so it caused me to open up my horizon, and Ole Miss recruited me.
“And I explained to her very clearly, ‘Had I gotten my dream of going to Clemson, I wouldn’t have met your mom, and there wouldn’t be no you.’ So just in that moment, being able to share that with her, that’s something I’ll always remember. She came over and hugged me later, and it was a special moment. And then the other night, when everything was final with the University of Tennessee, I look over, and she’s on her laptop looking at the University of Tennessee Nursing School. So hopefully, not pressing her, hopefully, we can get her to maybe want to be a Volunteer herself. So that would be the ultimate gift for me, but I’m gonna let her make her own decision.”
