Bill Battle
American college football player, college football coach
William Raines Battle III (December 8, 1941 – November 28, 2024) was an American college athletics administrator, football coach, and sports marketing businessman. He played college football for the Alabama Crimson Tide and was head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers. Battle later served as athletic director at Alabama.
Career
Battle played college football for Alabama from 1960 to 1962, as an offensive end. Battle was one of many of Bear Bryant's former players and assistant coaches who later became head coaches.
After graduation, he became an assistant football coach at Army (1964-1965), and then moved to Tennessee as offensive ends coach (1966-1969). When Doug Dickey left for Florida in 1970, Battle succeeded him as head football coach at Tennessee. At the time he began as head coach, he was at 28 the youngest college head coach in the country.
Battle had a 39-9 record in his first four years (1970-1973), but failed to continue Dickey's record of winning or contending for the Southeastern Conference championship. In the next three years (1974-1976), Tennessee was 20-13-2 (7-10-1 in conference play), and finished 8th in 1976.
The public source identifies “Bill Battle” as american college football player, college football coach. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bill, Battle and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4908058. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1941, 2024, 1960 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Battle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.