Former Tennessee head coach Butch Jones still has love for the Volunteers’ football program. While speaking on On3’s Andy & Ari podcast this week, Jones recounted fond memories of his time coaching at Tennessee and the respect that he still has for the Vols’ program.
“I love everything about Tennessee and what they stand for,” Jones said. “Again, that’ll always be a part of who we are.”
Jones still sits with some “extremely disappointing” outcomes from his tenure, though.
“But also, there are things I’m not going to hide behind,” Jones continued on to say. “There’s a lot of things that I wish we could’ve done better. You know, when you look at – I’m extremely disappointed for our players and for our fans that we weren’t able to win an SEC Championship, nor a National Championship. That’s always the goals when you’re the head football coach at the University of Tennessee. We had a great opportunity – I thought we put ourselves in that position, particularly in 2016, and we weren’t able to do it.”
Jones began his Tennessee tenure in 2013 and held the position until he was fired 10 games into the 2017 season. He recorded a 34-27 record in 61 games with the Vols, highlighted by back-to-back 9-win seasons in 2015 and 2016.
In the 2016 season that Jones mentioned, Tennessee began the season with five straight wins, including two Top 25 wins over Florida and Georgia. The Vols then took a hit with three straight losses to Texas A&M, Alabama, and South Carolina, including a double-overtime heartbreak in College Station. Tennessee got all the way up to No. 9 in the polls that season, but finished at No. 22 after going just 4-4 after the undefeated start.
Things began to unravel during the 2017 season. Through the months of September and October, Tennessee only had wins over Georgia Tech, Indiana State, and UMass. The Vols did not win an SEC game under Jones that season, and the final nail in the coffin was a blowout loss at Missouri on Nov. 11, 2017. Jones was fired from Tennessee the following day.
After his Tennessee tenure, Jones was brought onto Nick Saban’s Alabama staff as an offensive assistant. He spent three seasons with the Crimson Tide before being hired by Arkansas State before the 2021 season. Jones currently has a 26-37 record with the Red Wolves, which will be his longest coaching tenure at the start of the 2026 season.
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In late May, Jones was a guest at VFL Joshua Dobbs’ wedding. Other attendees included several of Dobbs’ teammates, including Trey Smith, Jalen Reeves-Maybin, Todd Kelly Jr., John Kelly, Kahlil McKenzie, Curt Maggitt, Josh Malone, Marquez North, Quart’e Sapp, Josh Smith, Dillon Bates, Jason Croom, and Brett Kendrick.
After the interview was released by On3 on Thursday, host Andy Staples posted to X that Jones’ former players “LOVE him.” College football reporter Jesse Simonton pushed back on that narrative to a degree.
“Some of his former players love him,” Simonton posted to X. “Poll the players from his last two Tennessee teams and you’re going to get some very different answers.”
Jones’ Tennessee team did see significant turnover between the 2016 and 2017 seasons.
One of the aspects of Jones’ tenure that Tennessee fans remember infamously was his use of quirky expressions and sayings, such as “Brick-by-Brick” and “Champions of Life.” Jones explained the stories behind those two sayings during the interview on Thursday.
“The Brick-By-Brick, actually, is kind of a funny story,” Jones said. “There’s a prominent former head football coach in the National Football League with Tennessee ties. He had visited us, and he knew exactly what we had to do and how we had to recruit our way out of it. He made a comment, we’re talking on the phone, he said, ‘Butch, you’ve just got to build it brick-by-brick.’ And so that’s actually how the brick-by-brick started, and then it was a recruiting mantra. We were trying to generate momentum, and probably should’ve kept it internally, but as y’all know, it kind of created a life of its own.”
“And then the other thing is the Champions of Life (comment). That was actually the Big 12’s slogan for their conference at that particular time. I was doing it to protect our players. We were heading into Senior Day, the Josh Dobbs of the world and all of those individuals who had helped lay the foundation for future successes and the success that we had, it was just a way of saying that I respect them and respect them for what they did and that they were great people.”
Check out Butch Jones’ full interview with On3’s Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman here.
