HOOVER, Ala. – He’s a walking contradiction to everything you’ve been told or sold about student athletes.
He’s not looking for the easy out, not finding the easy classes or the easy road or blaming someone else for something he should have controlled but didn’t.
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Josh Dobbs plays football at Tennessee. He’s also an aerospace engineer major.
Before we go further, let’s get one thing straight: “They’re both very important to me,” Dobbs said. “Neither is more important than the other.”
He’s the star quarterback for the Vols, the one player that is so important to the team’s future, he sat in on the interview process this offseason for Tennessee’s new offensive coordinator.
He’s a star in the classroom, recently completing an elite internship at Pratt and Whitney in West Palm Beach – an internship that has opened future doors he couldn’t have imagined.
He is the poster boy for everything the NCAA has tried to argue during its landmark litigation of fighting to keep money from players. And he just might be the first feel-good superstar the SEC has had since a guy named Tebow.
His teammates call him Astro; his coach calls him his CEO.
“There aren’t many like him,” says Tennessee coach Butch Jones.
Yet there was Dobbs, sitting in front of microphones and cameras and notepads all afternoon at SEC Media Days, dressed neatly in an orange gingham shirt and a Smokey Mountain gray suit and answering questions about finally beating Florida. Or winning the East Division. Or leading Tennessee back to relevance or the importance of momentum or the pressure of playing as the favorite.
Pressure? When Dobbs was in seventh grade, he asked his mother to take him to the Tuskegee Airman Camp in Atlanta. He was 13 years old and wanted to learn how planes were manufactured.
Years later, he’s taking classes on aerospace physics and thermodynamics and began his Tennessee career by loading up on coursework that would allow him to finish early and explore internship opportunities. He’s not allowing some flunky in the academic advisement office to fill out his schedule.
Earlier this spring, Dobbs worked on the F-135 engine for Pratt and Whitney, the power for the F-35 Lightning II – a new plane that will soon be war ready. Even ran the engine on one of his last days in south Florida.
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You really think he’s going to get frazzled this fall in Gainesville when it’s third-and-9 in the fourth quarter and the Vols need a critical first down?
“He has this calm way about him,” said Tennessee cornerback Cam Sutton. “You see that and it just makes you think everything is going to be OK.”
Because that’s what the CEO does, what Jones has tried to drill into Dobbs this offseason. It’s not just running the company, it’s making everyone around you better.
It’s making tailback Jalen Hurd (who now weighs 242 pounds) more dangerous. It’s making wideouts Marquez North and Pig Howard and Josh Malone more dynamic.
It’s taking a young team still learning how to win games that matter, and zeroing in on what’s important and ignoring what’s not.
“A lot of what goes on in the classroom can translate to what happens on the field,” Dobbs said.
Imagine that, an actual connection between the classroom and the field – right down to the time-honored practice of taunting.
“I guess other teams could taunt me,” Dobbs said. “What are they going to say, ‘You’re smart!’”
A walking contradiction, all right.