Butch JonesYet another of the four knee surgeries he would endure during his University of Cincinnati football career just completed, Alex Apyan received an unexpected phone call.
“It was Coach [Butch] Jones,” recalled the 2007 Hixson High School grad over the weekend. “He’d only been on the job about three months, but he called me the day after the surgery to see how I was doing.
“I was a reserve long snapper, not exactly high on any coach’s priority list, but he took the time to call. When I’d had other surgeries, neither Coach [Brian] Kelly nor his assistants ever called.”
If you really want to know about the man the Tennessee Vols just hired to revive their struggling football program you can do worse than listen to one of Jones’ former players at Cincinnati the past three seasons.
As Apyan said, he wasn’t anyone likely to influence Jones’ career path. His greatest strength was probably his GPA. At the end of his five seasons at UC, Jones selected the aerospace engineering major Apyan to join the school’s Legion of Excellence, which includes one student from each of the Bearcats’ varsity sports.