University of Tennessee Athletics
Winning In The Classroom
December 18, 2014 | Football
By Brian Rice KNOXVILLE, Tenn.
UTSports.com
The Volunteers finished the fall semester with a 2.75 GPA, with 46 players earning a 3.0 or better, also a program best.
The 46 players with a 3.0 or better GPA is more than double the 21 UT had in the fall of 2011 and the third-straight fall with an increase.
Tennessee's GPA has improved in each of Butch Jones' two seasons at UT, after posting the then-second-highest GPA in program history in 2013 with a 2.64.
"I'm very, very proud of our players and the effort that they put in to the classroom," Jones said. `We talk about that it starts with academics and winning in the classroom and they were able to do that."
Quarterback Joshua Dobbs, whose heavy academic load in Aerospace Engineering has become the stuff of legends, was proud of the work that he and his teammates put in.
"It was great today to hear it in the team meeting," Dobbs said. "It's a great accomplishment and goes along with all of the other great things we have done this year.
"It shows that we put the effort into the football field that we do to our academics and that we're student-athletes and the `student' comes first and we're rewarded for our hard work in the classroom."
11 members of Team 118 earned their degrees at the end of the fall semester and went through graduation ceremonies last Saturday.
Justin Coleman was one of those 11 and will play his final game at Tennessee as a college graduate.
"It means a lot to me," Coleman said. "We wanted to get Tennessee back on top and the first step was to make good grades and academics a priority to take care of what we needed to."
There are many people responsible for the progress that has been made, a team from top to bottom that continues to epitomize the One Tennessee mantra that the entire athletic program at Tennessee is being built around.
"There's a lot of hard work that goes into it, starting with our student-athletes, but it's also Dr. Joe Scogin and the entire Thornton Center staff," Jones said. "They've done a tremendous job and our parents of our players should be very, very proud."
In addition to the 46 players with a 3.0 GPA for the fall semester, 55 players earned the Vol Scholar designation, meaning they have earned either a single semester or cumulative 3.0 GPA and will be eligible to wear the Vol Scholar patch on their jerseys beginning with the TaxSlayer Bowl.
Dobbs wears his patch with honor.
"You have to be on top of your game, there's a lot thrown at you," Dobbs said of managing the balance between football and the classroom. "You don't have much time to spread between football and academics, so you have to have great time management skills. It's a tough challenge, but it's exactly what we signed up for."
