Like Butch Jones at Tennessee, Appalachian State’s Scott Satterfield, pictured, is entering his fourth season in charge of his program. But Satterfield also played for the Mountaineers and had two stints as an assistant at the Boone, N.C., school before taking over as head coach.KNOXVILLE – Tennessee football coach Butch Jones likes to refer to a season opener as the game of the unknowns.
There are fewer mysteries for this one, though, as the Volunteers embark on their fourth season with Jones at the helm.
While Jones understandably is anxious to see how Tennessee starts a highly anticipated season at 7:30 tonight against Appalachian State, he knows this team – one full of proven players he recruited – better than any of his previous ones in Knoxville.
“I trust these guys,” he said. “I know them and I care about them greatly. They’ve also earned my trust, and I have great, great confidence in them. The hardest thing when you take over a football program is you have to make sure that you have to lay (down) that standard of expectations day in and day out and you do not compromise from those standards. The culture has to be set in place.
” It’s better to be a player-coached team than a coach-coached team. Sometimes I don’t even have to say anything on the practice field. There’s older players that beat me to that opportunity to correct, whether it’s effort, whether it’s a fundamental, whether it’s a detail, whether it’s situational football. To me, that’s been the evidence of growth in a football program.”
The foundation clearly is there for the Vols, and it has translated into a preseason top-10 ranking and an aura of excitement around the program and this season.
On Wednesday’s Southeastern Conference coaches teleconference, Jones said Tennessee sold out of season tickets for the first time since 2001. Compare the total of season tickets sold (72,700) this year to the average attendance (89,965) during the 2012 season, Tennessee’s final year under Derek Dooley. That’s the nadir from which Jones has resurrected the Vols.
After increasing win totals from five in 2013 to seven in 2014 to last season’s nine while upgrading the roster through impressive recruiting and development, Tennessee enters the season with its most talented and deep roster in years.
Now it’s time for the Vols to capitalize and deliver amid lofty expectations.
“There’s always high expectations at Tennessee, and that’s basically what you want,” Jones said Wednesday. “But the expectations always have to be higher internally, and that’s where we’re at. I’m proud of how far we’ve come. I don’t think truly it gets recognized how far we’ve come. We’ve really had only two-and-a-half recruiting classes building the program from ground zero in the toughest football conference in all of the country. I’m really, really proud of our players, our support staff, our administration, our coaches.
“But it’s what you do with those expectations. You can embrace them, or you can allow them to seep in and affect you in a negative way. This team has had a workmanlike approach each and every day. We don’t really even talk about the expectations. The only expectations we have is to continue to get better as a football family each and every day.”
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.