‘It makes me sick to my stomach’ – Butch Jones had an eventful night including a strange viral clip and cursing during his post-game press conference
Former Tennessee Volunteers head coach Butch Jones played some of his greatest hits on Thursday night in Arkansas State’s loss to South Alabama.
Arkansas State head coach Butch Jones had an eventful Thursday night.
Jones and the Red Wolves fell to 2-4 on the season after losing 56-49 to South Alabama.
The former Tennessee Vols head coach saw his night get off to a rough start after a clip of him talking to his team went viral.
The clip showed Jones first screaming at his players before telling them that they need to lead the country in effort.
Nothing Jones said was wrong — effort and being connected as a team are two huge keys to being successful in college football — but the delivery just feels so…awkward. It feels more performative than genuine.
Anyway, that wasn’t the only viral moment that happened during the game.
Jones was also seen crashing out on the sideline at one point (shoutout to @gmannVOLS by the way for getting the clips of Jones on social media).
After the game, Jones went on a couple of rants — and dropped a rare curse word (not something we see Butch do very often) — during his 16 minute press conference.
“Last year’s team started 1-4 and nobody blinked in our program when everything else was chaos, and we won a bowl championship,” said Jones. “And I expect the same (this year). We’ll come back to work tomorrow. We’ll work to get better. But I want our fans to know that I appreciate them, and it is unacceptable, and I will work every day to get this s–t fixed because it is unacceptable with our performance, the way we played defense, the way we tackled, not taking care of the football, and the special teams aspect of it. I am responsible for all of it. I get it. There’s a lot that goes into that, but we will work tirelessly to get this thing corrected.”
“The way we started the second half was unacceptable,” continued Jones. “And we come out at halftime, and within that first drive of the second half, we had five missed tackles and a personal foul penalty. That’s not winning football. And so these are all things that we’ll continue to stress. We’ll go to work. We’ll work to be better for it. But like I said earlier, those are unacceptable. Just the whole thing — it makes me sick to my stomach. We’ve not played like this since probably year one or year two.”
Jones hasn’t changed much since his time at Tennessee.
And what’s wild is that his messaging isn’t bad, it’s just the delivery. It’s like Jones always knows when the camera is on him and he’s playing to that, instead of just being true to himself and staying in the moment.
