The myth would have it that in 1964 Doug Dickey, UT football coach (later athletics director), stood musing on the field about how better to tie athletics to academics. As he gazed across the stadium toward the Hill, the myth goes, his eye lighted on the band of checkerboard bricks that surround the tower of Ayres Hall, giving him the inspiration for Neyland Stadium’s end zone design. In a 2007 article on ESPN.com, Ron Higgins quotes Dickey as saying, “I got the idea to use checkerboard when I saw it in a magazine, maybe in an ad. The design caught my eye and I thought we needed to dress up the stadium. It was drab and we needed some color. People liked the checkerboard end zones, and it’s nice to have an identifying product that’s lasted over the years.”
The checkerboards were removed in 1968 when the Vols installed artificial turf. The checkerboards returned on new artificial turf installed in 1989. When the Vols went back to natural grass in 1994, Peyton Manning’s freshman year, the checkerboards got a fresh design. Prior to the checkerboard, a script “Tennessee” was in the end zones.