Ranking Tennessee football coaches who played for rival schools

Alma mater: Alabama Crimson Tide

Bill Battle played for Bear Bryant with the Alabama Crimson Tide in the early 1960s. He then spent five years as the program’s athletic director from 2013 to 2017, which included the two years Nick Saban was defensive coordinator.

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In between that, Battle was an assistant coach, ironically with the Army Black Knights and then with Tennessee football, and he had also gone into business. In between his business career and assistant career, he spent seven years as head coach of the Vols.

Battle inherited a program that had re-emerged in the late 1960s under Doug Dickey, and he was left a ton of talent when Dickey left in 1970. At the time, the Vols were on the heels of five straight top 20 finishes, two SEC Championships, including one in 1969, and a season that would involve a retroactive national championship in 1967.

Early on, Battle continued the success. He went 11-1 with a Sugar Bowl win and top five finish in 1970. Then he went 10-2 and finished in the top 10 in 1971 and 1972. In 1972, Condredge Holloway became the first black starting quarterback in the SEC. However, the program was sliding because of how it was behind the times, and Battle couldn’t keep up.

Holloway kept him afloat in 1973 and 1974 with two more top 20 finishes, but in 1975 and 1976, UT went 7-5 and 6-5, missing bowl games both years. After 1976, Battle was fired to make room for Vol graduate Johnny Majors, who was a Heisman Trophy runner-up when leading the Vols to the SEC title in 1956 and had just won a national title with the Pittsburgh Panthers in 1976.