Leadership Reps: Power ranking the best Butch Jones cliches
By John Buhler
1. Champions of Life
“They’ve won the biggest championship – that’s the championship of life,” – Jones on how his first class of recruits, the Class of 2013, failed to reach a SEC Championship in all four years that they were in Knoxville.
This is the epitaph quote of the cliche-riddled five years of the Jones era of Tennessee football. After being hyped as the runaway favorite to win the SEC East in 2016, Tennessee went 8-4 (4-4) and failed to get to the conference championship game for the ninth straight year.
Jones promised to bring back the championship pedigree to Tennessee football when he took over for Dooley in 2013. His first recruiting class went four years without even sniffing a SEC East division crown. Tennessee had its opportunities to get to Atlanta in 2015 and 2016 but saw the rival Florida Gators go to the Georgia Dome and get steamrolled by the Alabama Crimson Tide instead of the Volunteers.
Like the Five-Star Hearts quote, this is a defeatist quote that a head coach at a blue-blood program should never say. It’s hokey and belongs in a small market, mid-major program. Tennessee is a college football program that wins national titles, SEC championships and SEC East division titles. Calling your players Champions of Life trivialized what it means to win.
When those kids committed to Tennessee, they dreamed of returning Volunteers football to glory. Instead, they got a bunch of redundant clichés spat at them and at least three SEC losses annually.
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Tennessee may not be a 10-win program anymore. Is Jones good enough to get the Volunteers to eight or nine wins annually? Absolutely, but Tennessee wants more out of his football coach besides trite statements and broken promises of winning.