Jon Gruden tells classic must-hear story about his first spring game at Tennessee and his experiences with the Vols against Alabama
Thanks in large part to a couple of wild coaching searches, Tennessee Vols fans are well aware that former NFL head coach Jon Gruden was a graduate assistant at UT for a couple of seasons in the mid 1980s. (Gruden's first coaching job out of college was as a graduate assistant on Johnny Majors' staff […]
Thanks in large part to a couple of wild coaching searches, Tennessee Vols fans are well aware that former NFL head coach Jon Gruden was a graduate assistant at UT for a couple of seasons in the mid 1980s.
(Gruden's first coaching job out of college was as a graduate assistant on Johnny Majors' staff at Tennessee in 1986 and 1987.)
Gruden joined the It's All About the Team podcast with former Ohio State Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel this week and he shared a couple of great stories from his time at Tennessee, including one about his first spring game and the incredible coaches that were on the Vols' staff at the time.
"I mean, if there's a better place to see a game, you (Tressel) might argue Ohio State, but when you go watch Tennessee," started Gruden. "I remember my very first experience there. It was the spring game after they won the Sugar Bowl and they were going to break a world record — the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people to ever attend a spring football game. Now, Neyland stadium has 99,000 [or] 100,000 fans. So it was the GAs against the full time coaches. I'm a GA, so we run out there. It's the Orange and White game. I'm coaching the White team with the GAs. And they introduce your name — for the white team, Jon Gruden. I'm like, 'ah dang, this is unbelievable'. It gives you goosebumps running down your veins, man. It was awesome.
"And then, you look around, there's Johnny Majors. Ron Zook is on the staff…Phil Fulmer was the offensive line coach. David Cutcliffe, who was the man at Duke, he was our tight ends coach. We had a hell of a staff, man. And Ken Donahue was Bear Bryant's number one assistant all those years, he was our defensive coordinator. So I was in a football factory, and I loved it, man."
Gruden also told a great story about the time that Tennessee didn't realize they were playing against an Alabama freshman that would go on to become a Hall of Famer.
"Here's a great one for you," said Gruden. "We're in a meeting, we're playing Alabama. We got the best coaching staff in the country. We got Phil Fulmer, David Cutcliffe, Walt Harris. They got Cornelius Bennett over here. So we had a great idea — let's run at the other guy. Let's run away from Cornelius Bennett. Let's run after this guy and kick his butt, he's a freshman. So we run this way, and this guy, after the game we realize it's Derrick Thomas — we're running right into Derrick Thomas the whole game."
The late Derrick Thomas would go on to reach nine Pro Bowls during an illustrious carer with the Kansas City Chiefs. He was posthumously inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009.
There's a few more Gruden/Tennessee stories that he shared with Tressel that are worth checking out in the video above.
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