Athletic Program Quotes

I wanted to go somewhere and make a name for myself. I wanted to go somewhere and establish a winning culture because everybody knows about the football team. So I wanted to change the culture and make it both basketball as well as football and just give the fans what they want in Tuscaloosa.

To stay in one time zone and play in a great conference - a great all-around conference, but, specifically, a great basketball conference - is a great thing.

You can't just be anyone who is off the streets and come do what we do. You have to train, and there has to be something within you. You have to have athletic ability... What we do is 100 percent athletic. I feel like it's one of the top athletic programs out there when you consider professional sports.

You can lose a coach every once in a while. You really need to keep an athletic director because you need a guy that's there consistently for as long a time period as possible because he's managing everybody. He affects everybody and when he leaves, he affects everybody.

If I didn't love the game, why would I play at the University of Kentucky? Why would I ever come here? It's a serious program.

Fisher DeBerry always puts together a great team.

Tennessee is a program that I thought had a lot of tradition. A program that I thought stood for something.

We have mentally tough players coming out of Villanova.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961.

I had played in a tournament with the captain of the University of Minnesota's golf team, and he thought I was good. He called his coach, and the coach called me and recruited me. A five-minute phone call changed my life.

It was about a football program that brought in massive amounts of money. They're going to try to cover something up, because it's about money at the end of the day. That's clear. There's no ambiguity to that. Paterno is much more complicated and contradictory, and that's why he's interesting to me.

Everyone wrote our obituary but us and the coaches and the kids who stayed with us. The obit was, 'Vanderbilt will have to leave the Southeastern Conference. All the coaches are leaving, and all the students are transferring.'

The University of Memphis didn't have the flashy profile or the national exposure. It's a great university. I love the offense. I love the atmosphere, the big city. They have everything I want. The only knock against them is they are not a great team.

I am fully committed to Ohio State, the football program, as long as I can.

I'm going to be the coach at Florida as long as they'll have me.

What happens in college is every year, or every two years, sometimes every three, you get a new flock of graduate assistants that come in even though the head coach remains the same.

Stanford's an amazing, amazing school. It was an extraordinary soccer program.

I took a leave of absence for a year to coach at San Francisco State under Vic Rowen, fully intending to go back to high school.

I believe we have the best football coach in the country in Urban Meyer. I had the privilege of hiring him, as you know, and I think he is doing fabulous work.

I look at Syracuse and I love the way that the coaches say they'll use me in their offense. I really like the family atmosphere there and I feel really comfortable there.

I never brought it up when I coached, but I have close ties at Ohio State. Unfortunately, I even have a graduate degree from there.

I coached at Northwestern for eight years, where the admission requirements were high.

There's a lot of people who think in order to be a good head coach, you've got to be a head coach at a smaller school.

I will always support St. John's University in keeping our basketball tradition alive!

I might not have a conference championship or a national championship as a head coach, but I had the recruiting factor.