Vince Dooley, longtime Georgia football coach, dies at 90
ATLANTA — Vince Dooley, the football coach who carried himself like a professor and guided Georgia for a quarter-century of success that included the 1980 national championship, died Friday. He was 90.
The school announced that Dooley died peacefully at his Athens home in the presence of his wife, Barbara, and their four children, including former Tennessee coach Derek Dooley. No cause of death was given.
Dooley was hospitalized this month for what was described as a mild case of COVID-19, but he pronounced himself fully recovered and ready to attend his regular book-signing session at the campus bookstore before an Oct. 15 game against Vanderbilt.
Dooley had a career record of 201-77-10 while coaching the Bulldogs from 1964 to 1988, a stretch that included six Southeastern Conference titles, 20 bowl games and just one losing season.
“Our family is heartbroken by the death of Coach Dooley. He was one of a kind with an unmatched love for UGA!” current Georgia coach Kirby Smart said.
Dooley is the fourth-winningest coach in SEC history, trailing only Bear Bryant, Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier.
“Vince Dooley was one of my favorite people in the world,” Saban said. “Vince represented the University of Georgia and all of college football with tremendous integrity and class as both a coach and athletics director.”
After retiring from coaching, Dooley continued as the school’s AD, a job he held from 1979 until 2004. The field at Sanford Stadium was dedicated in his honor during the 2019 football season.
Josh Brooks, the school’s current athletic director, said the big-money program he now guides “is what it is today because of Vince Dooley.”
Dooley withstood the pressure of winning at a footballmad SEC school during an era when Bryant ran a powerhouse program at Alabama. Dooley won over skeptics early on, using a trick play to upset the defending national champion Crimson Tide 18-17 in the 1965 season opener.
The following year, Georgia won the first of his SEC titles. By the time Dooley stepped down from coaching at age 56, he was one of only 10 NCAA Division I-A coaches to win 200 games.
Stoic in his demeanor and elegant with words delivered in a Southern drawl, a renaissance man who dabbled in horticulture, studied Civil War history and wrote numerous books, Dooley had his greatest run of success after landing a running back from tiny Wrightsville, Ga. Hershel Walker. During Walker’s three years between the hedges, the Bulldogs went 33-3, won three straight SEC titles, captured a national title and nearly won another in 1982.
Walker, now running for the U.S. Senate, tweeted a picture of him and Dooley on the field at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium before Georgia’s seasonopening victory over Oregon.
“Thank you Coach Dooley, for being one of the greatest men I have ever known,” Walker wrote. “You mean more to me than you’ll ever know.”