Imagine taking over a company that is at its peak in terms of profit and revenue but made a bunch of investments before you got there that were going to derail it in the end. You would then have to preside over its downfall even though none of it was your fault.
That’s exactly the task Bill Battle was faced with when he took over Tennessee.
The former UT head coach from 1970 to 1976 passed away Thursday at the age of 82. Battle played for the Alabama Crimson Tide under Bear Bryant from 1960 to 1962 and also served as Bama’s athletic director from 2013 through 2017.
Battle was promoted to head coach at Tennessee at the age of 28 after serving under Doug Dickey as an assistant from 1966 to 1969. He inherited a program that had won two SEC championships in the previous three years, including a retroactively declared national title in 1967.
Early in his tenure, he seemed to be carrying on the success of Dickey. In his first year, Battle went 11-1, leading the Vols to a Sugar Bowl victory and top five finish. In each of the next two years, he would go 10-2 and finish in the top 10.
During that time, Battle also continued overseeing cultural changes in the program that began under Dickey. While Dickey integrated the program, Battle would oversee UT teams that produced the first Black captain in the SEC, Jackie Walker, and most notably the first Black starting quarterback in the league, Condredge Holloway.
All of this was marred by how his tenure ended, though. After those first three seasons, Battle oversaw a steady decline, going 8-4 in 1973 and 7-3-2 in 1974. Then, after Holloway left, he went 7-5 in 1975 and 6-5 in 1976. UT forced him out to make room for its favorite son, Johnny Majors, who had just won a national title with the Pittsburgh Panthers.
Here’s the problem: Tennessee’s decline was an administrative issue, not one of his own making.
While Battle was leading UT to early success built by Dickey, the program itself was falling behind in the SEC. It refused to increase its recruiting budget to go national, and there was a period in the early 1970s when it was even hostile to putting up lights at Neyland Stadium. Most notably, though, the facilities were the worst in the SEC.
As an Alabama graduate who was so young upon taking the job, Battle had little power or leverage to demand more. This all happened, though, as the Tide were at their peak under Bear Bryant, and the Georgia Bulldogs were rolling under Vince Dooley. Winning was hard.
Still, Battle carried through, class act that he was, and took all the blame for the lack of elite.recruiting despite the lack of support to do such a thing against increased competition.
When Majors arrived at Tennessee, the issues were clear. He went 4-7 in 1977, worse than any year Battle had. A common narrative is that Majors inherited such a mess from Battle that it took a while to rebuild the program, but he then went 5-5-1 in 1978 and 5-6 in 1980. So in four years, Majors’ best season was the one that got Battle fired.
That wouldn’t suggest just inheriting a mess from your predecessor. Typically, four years is plenty of time to turn around a program.
What’s more obvious is that Majors, like Battle, was overseeing a program far behind the rest of the SEC. Thanks to an ahead of the curve track program that brought athletes to the football team and built Wide Receiver U, Majors finally had enough success in the early 1980s to use his leverage, as UT’s favorite son, to upgrade the program administratively.
Eventually, with better facilities and more success, the Vols hit their golden age of the modern era, which Majors built and Phillip Fulmer took to its peak, but never forget amidst all that what an unfair deal Battle got. Nobody sees it that way now.
Unfortunately, the narrative of Battle is that he inherited a successful program and ran it into the ground before Majors built it back up. The problem with that narrative is Majors had way too many mediocre to bad years after Battle to suggest it was all about what Battle did. There were administrative issues that ran deep then, and Battle was the victim.
