University of Tennessee Athletics
Inside The T – Building A Legend
October 02, 2015 | Football
By Brian Rice
UTSports.com
Tennessee will honor former head coach and athletics director Doug Dickey this afternoon with the dedication of the Doug Dickey Hall of Champions at the Neyland-Thompson Sports Complex.
The Doug Dickey Hall of Fame Plaza will follow, an area that will connect the new dorm under construction on the site of the former Gibbs Hall and Stokely Athletics Center to the sports complex.
Any level of honor for Dickey at Tennessee would be appropriate for someone who meant as much to the development of the athletics program as he did.
Dickey literally brought Tennessee into the modern era of football when he became head coach as a relatively unknown former quarterback from the University of Florida in 1964. The 31-year old knew that the Volunteers needed to move forward from the single-wing offense that was keeping UT stuck in days gone by.
The Volunteers had not won more than six games in the past six seasons prior to Dickey’s arrival. His first season saw just four wins, but his teams would go on to win 46 games and two Southeastern Conference championships during his six-season tenure. The 1967 team was named National Champions by the Litkenhouse rating service.
But his biggest victory had little to do with football. In 1965, Dickey led the Volunteers to an 8-1-2 record, a mark that led to SEC Coach of the Year honors. To accomplish that, he had to rally his team after three assistant coaches were killed in a car accident two mornings after a 7-7 tie against Alabama. It was a somber game day the following Saturday when UT defeated Houston 17-9, but the Volunteer family had won by rallying around each other to get through the tragedy.
He also established Tennessee’s most popular game day traditions as head coach. The orange and white checkerboard end zones were his creation, as was the Power T on the sides of the helmets. The human T that has become one of the most iconic entrances in college sports was a idea from Dickey and band director Dr. Jay Julian.
He returned to his alma mater following the 1969 season, a decision that still draws the ire of some longtime fans, but he left the program in far better shape than he found it. The Vols would win 31 games over the next three seasons.
Dickey came back to Tennessee, this time as athletics director in 1985, to once again usher UT into the future.
He knew that the facilities at UT would be in desperate need of modernization over the coming years, as the facilities arms race in college athletics was just beginning. The inflatable bubble that served as an indoor practice space for football was adequate for the time. The antiquated weight and training rooms in Stokely were not.
Tying season tickets and parking passes to donations to the athletics department was a fairly new idea at the time, but Dickey knew it was the future. The move proved incredibly successful for the department and the university. The Neyland-Thompson Center where Dickey will be honored was one of the first facilities of its type in the country and was one of the crown jewels of his tenure as athletics director.
Tom Black Track, Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the Goodfriend Tennis Center, the Thornton Center and numerous upgrades and expansions of Neyland Stadium were all products of the Dickey era. So was the school’s first-ever all-sports apparel contract with adidas in 1997, an agreement unprecedented for its era. National Championships in football and men’s track and two College World Series appearances in baseball came on his watch.
By the time he turned in his keys in 2003, every men’s sport at UT had won an SEC title on his watch and they all competed in facilities that became the model for other schools’ capital projects.
Look around the next time you’re on campus and you’ll see Dickey’s fingerprints on many of the places where athletes study, train and compete. Now, there will be a permanent way to honor the person that helped make it all possible. As UT continues to move into the future, it will do so while honoring the man that twice brought the school into a new era.
