Bobby Dodd transferred from Vanderbilt to UT in mid-semester of his freshman year when Vanderbilt got his initial grades. He played in a freshman football game for UT the afternoon that he transferred. He was UT quarterback from 1928 to 1930 and was part of the famous Hack, Mack, and Dodd backfield at Tennessee. A member of Sigma Nu fraternity and the Scarabbean Society, he was named the most valuable player in the annual basketball tournament held by the intramural department and was cocaptain of the varsity basketball team for 1929. He was an All-America football selection in 1930.
Shortly after his senior season and before he graduated, he was hired as an assistant coach at Georgia Tech. When Head Coach Bill Alexander retired in 1945, Dodd succeeded him. During a career as head coach that lasted through 1966, he compiled a record of 165 wins, 64 losses, and 8 ties. His teams went to thirteen bowl games and won nine—eight of them in a row. Dodd never signed a coaching contract. He served as Georgia Tech athletics director from 1951 to 1976 and then worked as a consultant for the Alumni Association until his death in 1988.
In the 1956 Sugar Bowl, by playing the University of Pittsburgh, which had a black player, Dodd and the president of Georgia Tech stood up to the Georgia governor, the legislature, and citizens groups by breaking the racial barrier behind which white teams in the South refused to play teams with black players.
The Georgia Tech stadium surrounding Grant Field was named for Dodd in 1988. In 1964 he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame as a player, and some several years later attempted to change his Hall of Fame designation from Tennessee Player to Georgia Tech Coach. He was elected to the Hall of Fame as coach in 1993.