46-15-4 (21-10-4 SEC); 1 National Championship; 2 SEC Championships
We go from Johnny Majors to the man who fired Majors when he took over as athletic director. The 1910s and 1920s were an era of launching Tennessee football into the national spotlight with cool traditions. Doug Dickey is a legend because he, along with Ray Mears in basketball, took it to a new level when they took over in the 1960s.
Given the failures of the Vols falling behind by sticking to the single wing, they needed new flare, and these two brought it. Mears coined the phrase Big Orange Country and wore the orange jacket. Dickey, for his part, established the tradition of running through the T and the checkerboard end zones on either side of the stadium.
On the field, Dickey was the first UT coach to recruit and play Black players, and he was among the first in the SEC to do so. Schematically, he moved back to the T-formation, but this was the 1960s, so it was the new fashionably Slot-T. This was a scheme that resulted in quarterbacks becoming the stars for the first time on Rocky Top, and Dewey Warren was indeed the first such star.
All of this laid the foundation for success. After a 4-5-1 1964 campaign, Dickey ushered in a period of 10 straight bowl appearances and top 20 finishes, 12 straight winning seasons, two SEC Championships and a national championship.
In 1965, Tennessee football went 8-1-2 and finished in the top 10. Two years later, they went 9-2 and were retroactively awarded a national championship. He then led them to a 9-2 record and second SEC Championship in three years in 1969.
Although he left in 1969 to take over the Florida Gators, his alma mater, Dickey had built the Vols back into a national brand. That combined with his on-field success and what he inherited makes him clearly one of the three best coaches in school history.