Under Pat Dye, the Auburn Tigers faced the Tennessee football Volunteers 11 times.
Note: This is part of a series of posts remembering Johnny Majors and all that he accomplished for Tennessee football as a player and a coach.
Auburn Tigers head coach Pat Dye passed away Monday at 80 years old. Tennessee football head coach Johnny Majors passed away Wednesday at 85 years old. While Dye lead Auburn from 1981 to 1991, Majors led the Vols from 1977 to 1992.
Both coaches led their programs back to national prominence, with Dye winning four SEC Championships and Majors winning three. The two also met all 11 years in which they were both at their respective schools, with Dye enjoying a slight 5-4-2 advantage.
Ironically, the rivalry between Tennessee football began in 1956, during Major’s All-American season, and ended in 1991. When Majors was being recruited, his final two schools were the Vols and Auburn. Both coaches’ final seasons at their respective schools were 1992. Simply put, that rivalry was as much about Majors and Dye as anybody.
There were numerous memorable moments in those 11 games between the two coaches. Often, they had SEC implications. In this post, we’re going to rank all the matchups between Dye and Majors based on how memorable they were.
Our criteria for these rankings include how thrilling the game was itself, what it meant within the scope of the SEC season and the magnitude of the game. That final factor includes how highly ranked the teams were and whether or not an upset was pulled off.
We will look at all 11 games, as this was arguably the peak of the rivalry between the two schools. They created heroes and champions and helped to establish both programs. It’s why both men will be missed by everybody from Tennessee to Pennsylvania to Iowa to Alabama to Georgia.
These are two of the most legendary coaches in SEC history, and that included numerous memorable clashes between them. What did these clashes entail? Just how memorable were they? Let’s break all of that down here. This is our ranking of every matchup in history between Tennessee football and Pat Dye when Dye was a head coach.