Regrets? SOD’s had a few.

This is how you wind up discussing your team’s shower hygiene with the media.

Just ahead of the team opening fall camp though, it seems Dooley is doing some opening up himself. In an excellent Q&A with the St. Louis Dispatch, the always colorful coach discussed a number of topics like becoming an athletic director to working for Nick Saban to doing a job that he hasn’t done before. Perhaps the most notable parts of the piece are, as one might expect, Dooley reflecting on his time with the Vols however and he does not disappoint in talking about what went wrong in Knoxville.

“The difference was at Louisiana Tech everybody listened to me and did what I said. At Tennessee very few people listened to me and most of them did something different than what I said. That’s how it is at a lot of big places when you don’t come in empowered as “the guy.” you have to learn how to manage those environments,” said Dooley. “That’s what frustrated me. You can’t even compare the two. You had a lot of division going on between (Phil) Fulmer, (Lane) Kiffin and fans. There was a lot of division on campus. It was a different environment, and I didn’t see it that way but should have.”

The truly befuddling part isn’t that Dooley didn’t see it coming, but that Mike Hamilton thought it was a good move to hire Dooley in the first place, seventh choice or not.

On the other hand, “Dooley did add that his three years at Tennessee were a “humbling” experience and has made him a better coach.”  So Missouri’s got that going for them.