As Butch Jones looks to make some strides in the SEC with his Tennessee Volunteers, he has made it abundantly clear he wants nothing to do with Alabama when his team is in Knoxville.
On Tuesday night, a video surfaced online showing footage from the Volunteers' spring practices when a certain song about the state of Alabama came over the loudspeakers. Once the first few notes of the guitar riff to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" were heard, Jones launched into a campaign to have the song shut off.
SWEET HOME TENNESSEE from VFL FILMS on Vimeo.
"Why would we have that playing at Tennessee?" the football coach can be heard saying in the video. "Do you think you could go to Alabama and they sing 'Rocky Top'? That's embarrassing. Are we not at Tennessee?"
For the Win noted the video "may have been totally exaggerated for effect," but it certainly seemed authentic. While the song played on, Jones got assistants and other personnel searching for the source.
The person in charge of the football facility's loudspeaker said it was not coming from their field, but somewhere nearby. Her best guess was a neighboring fraternity house with a large speaker.
It turned out to be coming from the baseball field next door, where a charity event was being held. Jones did not seem to care.
"Hey. I'm serious, run over there and see if it's the baseball field and tell them that we're at Tennessee and don't play that here," he said in the video. "You can tell them I sent you."
Alabama-based website Yellowhammer News pointed out the Crimson Tide's eight consecutive wins against Tennessee, the most recent one in particular. Lane Kiffin, Tennessee's former coach and Alabama's current offensive coordinator, made his first return to Knoxville since leaving.
On Oct. 25, 2014, Alabama cruised to a 34-20 win thanks to Kiffin's game plan of heavily utilizing wideout Amari Cooper, an eventual Heisman finalist that season.
