“Had a great meeting with the team this morning. I can tell you they’re excited, ready to get to work and they’re really excited. We had an exhaustive, exhaustive nationwide search. I know that sounds crazy because I’m hiring the guy that I’ve worked with for the last three years. If anything, I was trying not to hire the head coach from UCF and I say that with respect to Tennessee, but I love UCF and I hate the transition that this is causing for the student-athletes down there. That’s the hard part of college athletics, but after going through extensive candidates we left no stone unturned. I’d like to thank the candidates; you’d be amazed if I could tell you, and I won’t, how many candidates we spoke with and there were no leaks until last night. Only two leaks that I’ve been a part of in my career as an AD and both of them happened in the last week. We need to work on that one here and we have to figure that one out. That’ll be one of my top priorities as we go through here. I really wanted the student-athletes to find out first from me and certainly I would want that for any group of student-athletes, but obviously for the student-athletes at UCF it is a shame that it leaked, but we will continue to work on that and tighten some things up. We left no stone unturned. We talked to head coaches, we talked to coordinators, we talked to long-seasoned coaches, talked to young up and coming coaches. Character and integrity were extremely important from the jump. We talked about that last week and will continue to be. I have zero questions about that with this guy. We want to build a program that we can all be proud of. After vetting every single option, we have obviously landed with a familiar face in Josh Heupel. He was our No. 1 option. This job was offered to one person. I know there’s a lot of rhetoric out there to the contrary and that is not true. We made one job offer, we got our No. 1 candidate and I couldn’t be more proud to have Josh as our new head football coach. Josh is in it for the right reasons. He’s student-athlete centered and that was his message to the team this morning. We filmed a video so he was able to talk with his team at UCF in person and we showed the video that he did for our team at Tennessee. He cares about the kids, I’ve seen that for three years. He cares deeply about their development as students, as people, as athletes and they need to know that. Future recruits need to know that and that’s what we are going to be about here at Tennessee in all of our sports.”
NEXT: Danny White on hiring Josh Heupel continued