KNOXVILLE — We sat down recently with Tennessee athletics director Phillip Fulmer to discuss a range of topics.

Here are parts of that discussion:

On settling into his role as AD in Knoxville ...

"I feel settled. The first three months, really, I just kind of listened and walked around and tried to get started on what our culture was going to look like, trying to evaluate people. I inherited people that I knew and people that I didn’t know at all. Several of them were key positions. As it turned out, I kept basically everybody.

"We changed some responsibilities and challenged everybody, ‘Hey, let’s be a team. If we have issues, we’ll close the door and we’ll talk about them. If we can resolve them, we will. And if we can’t, then change is not a terrible thing all the time.’ I think we’ve turned into a good team. I’m very fortunate to have experience here. … Really, the whole senior staff, their job is to keep me out of the ditch and make sure I don’t do something that’s harmful to us. But my job is culture and leading and putting ourselves – by hiring coaches – to be the best we can be.

See also:Phillip Fulmer reps Tennessee football's past glory while working to restore it | Estes

"My opinion, and it’s a very biased opinion – I’ll admit that on the front end – but it’s probably like most people that follow Tennessee, is that we should be competing for championships in most everything that we do, where we’re committed to facilities and money. If we’re not, why aren’t we? And there’s good reasons sometimes. You’re young or you have injuries or those kinds of things. But in most cases, we need to be nipping at somebody’s heel or winning the championship."

On if he had always wanted to try sports administration ...

"Not really. I’d been asked. I was asked while I was coaching if I was interested in doing that. I like the practices. I like the games. I loved recruiting. It really wasn’t something that I just thought I would want to do. But having the set of circumstances that we had (at Tennessee), I felt like I could do it. It’s still about building a team and leadership and letting your players play. That’s kind of what we’ve done.

"We are super fortunate to have the board that we have now. The president that we have and the chancellor, we are so aligned, like it was when I was here as the coach – most of my time here. Me and Pat Summitt and whoever, Bruce (Pearl), we all knew that the administration was going to do everything they could to help us be successful within their boundaries. And if they couldn’t, we knew that they tried. I don’t think that was the case for a lot of time here. Leadership matters at the top. We’re all communicating constantly. I want our academic side to be great. ... All boats rise together, and our chancellor (Donde Plowman) is exactly like that. She’s been at Tennessee. She’s been at Texas. She’s been at Nebraska. She knows what it looks like. And we, at times, have made it very difficult on ourselves because people weren’t communicating, had gotten into silos or ‘We’ve never done it that way,’ and that’s changed considerably."

On if he ever considered coaching somewhere else after 2008 ...

"Oh, I absolutely did. I had a big decision, went through the whole thing, interviewed at several places. I probably was more likely going to end up in pro football, back to being a position coach. I mean, I looked at everything in sports. But then I decided, I missed so much with my children that I just wasn’t going to miss it with my grandchildren. And I probably wasn’t going to be as passionate about coaching somewhere else as I had been at Tennessee. And that made me nervous. Was I going to be successful? Or worse yet, go to someplace that hadn’t won in 50 years and think I was going to change it? I didn’t want to do that. I looked at a couple of those. No, I think it worked out. ...

"Stayed right here. I don’t know if that was unusual or not. But I mean, this is home. One reason I didn’t take jobs to leave Tennessee that I had a chance to do professionally – pro football or otherwise – is my children were doing so great here. That was important to us. You take them and move them to one big city or another – the NFL stands for ‘not for long,’ you know – and move them around, I didn’t want to do that. I was fortunate to be able to stay here for that long, in one sense."

On speculation that he could perhaps coach Tennessee's football team again and if that was ever a possibility ...

"No. I mean, that energy level that it takes to do that. Could have coached and wanted to coach, that’s two different things, right? I certainly could have come coached the team or whatever, but the recruiting and the staffing and all those things, I’ve done my time, and I had a great run. That didn’t appeal to me, nor did I ever lose confidence that Jeremy (Pruitt) was going to do it.

"I could see the change (this past season). It didn’t look like it when we were 1-4 and at least one of the games – probably two of the games – that we could have or should have won. But you could see the progress that we were making. That’s one advantage of having been a coach. We were making good progress. It’s just that we had been inconsistent at spots and we made too many mistakes. If you turn the ball over five times and give up three sacks and three big plays on defense and have three big penalties in the game, a good high school team is going to beat you. You can’t do that. I’ve been in scrimmages before where the scout team kicked the (heck) out of us for those very reasons. So it can happen. We stopped making mistakes and played much better on defense. We stopped making mistakes on offense. We never did get to being a consistently good offensive team. We never got to that during the season, but we did defensively. And we stopped making mistakes that beat us on offense."

On being encouraged by the finish to this past football season ...

"I’m real encouraged about where we are. Now we’ve still got lots of work to do, I mean, tons of work to do to get where we want to. But our kids are more physical-looking. We’re more talented. We have established a culture of toughness here on both sides of the ball. We’re not nearly there on offense yet, but we’re a lot better than we were. I mean, we inherited a mess. I mean, it was a mess. That doesn’t mean there were bad kids all the way around. I don’t mean that. But there were some people that needed to leave the program. There were some people that needed to grow up. There were some people – kids – that needed to be tougher just generally or learn how to practice. We didn’t have very good practice habits here."

On Tennessee's basketball program ...

"Rick Barnes has brought – while we were struggling so much – the seasons he had the last two years honestly kind of held everything together. ‘Hey, we can still be champions.’ That night we beat Georgia for the SEC championship, honest to goodness, was like the national championship. In that arena, 20 minutes people stood and cheered uncontrollably, me included. ‘We can still do this,’ because we hadn’t experienced that in a little while. And he also brought a real positive attitude to campus and the kids with how he conducts himself, the gentleman that he is and the success that he’s had and how he manages adversity along the way. It’s been fun to be a part of that, and that helps football."

On the importance of convincing Barnes to stay ...

"It was very important, I think. I thank goodness for our administration stepping up to do that and not letting the financial part of it be the reason. We’re glad he’s here."

On his own role with the football program ...

"Sure, I see things, good and otherwise. Coach Pruitt and his staff have been great about if I see something, I tell them. Now I’m not allowed to coach on the field, just so we’re all clear on that. ... He listens, and sometimes he might use it and sometimes he might not. I mean, that’s their prerogative. That’s their responsibility in the end."

On if he has to be sensitive to those boundaries ...

"No, I don’t think I have to be. We agreed on the very front end that we are not going to walk on eggshells with each other. We have very frank conversations, and I think it’s really healthy, a really good relationship. ...

"I don’t know much about basketball, but I’m a coach. I can tell effort and fundamentals. Rick and I will have conversations. I think that’s an edge that we have. I guess you could ask the coaches, but tennis or swimming or whatever, we’ll talk about practice schedules and nutrition and routine, and I think I understand. I love baseball. One of the reasons I came to Tennessee was to play two sports. Tony (Vitello) and I talk baseball stuff all the time. It’s an advantage."

On how long he could see himself doing this job ...

"I’m in good health. I enjoy the job. I’m sure the chancellor and I will sit down and talk about that at some point, but right now, I’m excited about what we’re doing. As long as she wants me here, I think I’m doing a good job."

Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.