Well, this isn’t the way you want to start the day, but 3-star (per 247Sports) athlete Anthony Grant, whose Twitter bio identifies him as a Tennessee commit and includes a pinned tweet from June 25 saying he is committed to the Vols, reportedly announced this morning that he has changed his mind and will go to FSU:
BREAKING: First flip of #NSD2018… 4-star ATH Anthony Grant has flipped from the #Vols to #FSU. Grant to the #Noles.
Grant actually committed to Butch Jones, and he has reportedly been wavering for some time, although the latest concern was that he would choose Virginia Tech over the Vols. Regardless, he’s going somewhere other than Rocky Top. Best of luck to him.
While this isn’t the way you want to start the day, it’s not a shock. The Vols are still in the mix for some great players today. There are three players scheduled to announce at 10:00 a.m.: 5-star cornerback Tyson Campbell, 3-star safety Trevon Flowers, and 3-star defensive end John Mincey.
It’s National Signing Day, and today we’ll find out how much the solid and frenzied short-term work by Jeremy Pruitt and his staff will actually bear fruit. Tennessee starts the day at No. 20, and there will be a lot of movement among all teams, but we’re hoping that’s the floor for the Vols today and that they might even crack the Top 15, a solid win for a new coach on a short cycle.
Here’s a list of recruits on Tennessee’s recruiting board as of this morning along with their announcement times.
Tennessee should be in good shape, but mystery abounds, and Georgia, Alabama, and Auburn are players. Georgia, in particular, has made significant inroads lately and according to some experts, leads.
The Vols travel up the road to Lexington and Rupp Arena looking for a rare road victory and season sweep against the Kentucky Wildcats this evening. The game tips at 7:00 p.m. and will be televised on ESPN. You can catch it online via WatchESPN.
Just in case you’re not quite in the mood yet, this should help:
Our players are more talented than yours, nanananananana.
Tonight, we’re experimenting with including a curated Twitter stream of Tennessee media folks we follow in hopes that filtering out some of the non-game noise will make Twitter less of a distraction and more of a complement to the game. We’ll see how it goes.
Warning: Mixed metaphor zone. If you’re still a wallflower, standing on the sideline, reluctant for whatever reason to jump on the Vols hoops bandwagon — it’s time to find your courage, get in the game, and enjoy the ride.
Tennessee men’s hoops is quietly becoming a great team, doing what great teams do like beating opponents by 33 points.
So make yourself happy and get on the train before it leaves the station.
Tonight, #15 Tennessee travels to Rupp Arena to take on #24 Kentucky, and we’ll be re-introducing the GRT game thread for it. John Calipari is calling for all hands on deck, so not only do we have a road trip to a blue-blood rival at hand, that rival is wide awake and in attack mode. Will’s Tennessee-Kentucky game preview tells you what to watch for. This is basketball, so a road loss to a ranked rival won’t be devastating to the Vols, but tonight provides a significant opportunity to sweep Kentucky and continue to build momentum heading into the postseason.
Recruiting
Tomorrow is National Signing Day, and nobody knows anything about how the Vols are going to finish.
This similar post from SEC Country is a relatively more optimistic version of the same thing, guessing that Tennessee leads for Walker, 4-star Isaac Taylor-Stuart, and 4-star Emmit Gooden. The reason for the increased optimism is likely this post, also from SEC Country. Rivals, too, appears to think the Vols’ chances to land ITS are better than the Crystal Ball.
SB Nation has an NSD headquarters, complete with some announcement times for tomorrow.
We’ll have more on recruiting today and tomorrow, but for now, remember this: Nobody knows anything.
Walker is technically committed to Alabama, but he’s recently taken official visits to Tennessee and Auburn and will take one at Georgia this weekend. The 247Sports Crystal Ball is showing the Vols and the Bulldogs as the favorites to land Walker, who’s the No. 2 outside linebacker and the No. 31 overall prospect in this year’s class. To say that he’s a priority for the Vols would be an understatement.
What does Tennessee have to do to catch up with Auburn in the race for the SEC regular-season crown? Check out this video from the SEC Network on that topic and have a look at those BPI game-by-game projections for the Vols:
The Vols are favored in every game except the one against Kentucky and the officials at Rupp, and even that one is a coin flip. Woo.
Who’s the coach of the year in the SEC? So far, Jimmy Dykes says, it’s the guy whose team is currently projected as a four-seed in the tournament despite being picked next-to-last in his conference:
The No. 12 Lady Vols took care of business last night, beating No. 14 Texas A&M 82-67 with a strong fourth quarter. Highlights:
Other fun stuff
The SEC is distributing $596.9 million among the 14 conference schools. In case you don’t have a calculator, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that that’s a lot of money.
Hey, look. Dumb smart people!
And congrats to Alvin Kamara, who’s been named the NFL Rookie of the Year.
And a video game recap from the SEC Network with both highlights and commentary:
Here’s what Rick Barnes had to say in a short post-game segment on the SEC Network despite not being able to hear the questions at all (Flashback to: “I can’t hear you! Rocky Top is playing!”):
And here’s a playlist of Barnes’ longer post-game presser, along with a few player interviews (Grant Williams, JD3, and Kyle Alexander, whose golden tones rival Barry White’s):
And OH NOES! Rick Barnes committed an NCAA violation. What is the egregious sin of which he is guilty? Paying one of his assistants out of his own pocket because he thought he deserved as much as another assistant. Barnes brought it to the attention of the purse string folks, and they said it wasn’t in the budget, so Barnes fixed that for them by paying it out of his own salary. Hang him high!
In the process, I think we’ve also learned something important about Phillip Fulmer. Do you remember how a certain former coach used to get roasted for touting his own (sometimes questionable) accomplishments? And have you noticed that Pruitt’s not been doing that? Fulmer’s doing it for him. Accolades are always more credible and thus better received when it’s someone other than you giving them. Maybe that will change once Pruitt’s not playing catch up with recruits, but if that’s the model going forward, it’s an important public relations improvement.
“He showed he can turn recruiting around in a hurry. We tripled our recruiting board in like two days, with that staff — and not people that we were looking at, but people that were looking at us. That made a big difference. Unfortunately we had the early signing period. I’d like to have had another couple weeks with that, or it could have been really good.
“But we got recruiting turned, and turned quickly, and hopefully we can finish strong here. That’s the foundation of winning, is having the good players here.”
Tennessee took care of business against an out-manned LSU team tonight in Thompson-Boling Arena, beating the Tigers 84-61.
James Daniel III picked up where he left off against Iowa State Saturday and this time led the way for the Vols, scoring 17 points and adding 4 assists and 2 steals. Grant Williams added 16 points, and Jordan Bone and Lamonte Turner each had 12.
The Vols defense once again clamped down on its opponent, as the only real threat for LSU this evening was 6’11” Duop Reath, who scored 21 points for the Tigers. Tennessee held LSU as a team to 39.3% shooting from the field and a woeful 15.8% from the arc. The Vols, on the other hand, hit 54.1% from the field and 48% from three. Oh, and they had 24 assists on 33 made shots.
The Vols move to 16-5 overall and 6-3 in the conference with the following games remaining:
Ole Miss;
at #21 Kentucky;
at Alabama;
South Carolina;
at Georgia;
#23 Florida;
at Ole Miss;
at Mississippi State; and
Georgia
You don’t want to get too carried away, and there are no easy games in the SEC, but Tennessee should have the advantage in most of those, save the one at Kentucky in Rupp and the one against Florida. We’ll see how it goes.
I just finished writing the Vols link roundup for today and for some strange reason, I have this intense desire to find a Courtyard Marriott in Orlando and spend a few days at Universal waving magic wands.
I blame Peyton Manning.
Yeah, Tennessee’s favorite son makes everything more appealing. I’m just afraid he’s going to show up in my feed making jokes about kale smoothies and then I’m going to have to try one.
Which makes me wonder.
What are three products that even Peyton Manning couldn’t sell?
Just off the top of my head here:
1. Fish jerky
No. Just, no.
My wife and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon a long, long time ago. We awoke to the salt in the air, the breeze in our hair, and the sound of the waves crashing on the beach in our ears. We enjoyed a breakfast of pancakes with coconut syrup and fresh-squeezed guava juice that we still talk about nearly 25 years later.
The day went downhill from there. We decided to drive completely around whichever island we were on at the time, and the hairpin-after-hairpin endeavor had me sick as vomit by noon when we finally got to the top and found a little shack that had some food. I basically just got out of the car and tried in vain to make the world stand still while my wife ventured into the rickety old store for something to eat. She came out with some canned guava juice (not the same thing as fresh-squeezed, it turns out) and a package of fish jerky.
When we got back in the car and started back down the mountain, she opened the bag. Suddenly, everything smelled like we’d been marinating in rotted fish guts for a week. She held some chum out to me, and I not-so-politely declined, but she completely ignored the code red coming from her sense of smell and popped a piece into her mouth like it was nothing to fear.
For nearly quarter of a century, this moment has remained the best evidence that I am in fact smarter than she is. Also, that she is destined to die of curiousity long before me.
That fish jerky was not in her mouth for long, and it wasn’t in our car for much longer. If we could have tossed it to the next island, we would have. The smell, though, I am convinced, remains in the rental car to this day. I’m guessing they had to retire that one and write “No fish jerky” into all of their contracts after that.
So, if Peyton Manning showed up at my doorstep trying to sell me fish jerky, I would first say, “Hey, it’s Peyton Manning,” and then I would beat him with an iron pipe.
2. Lasagna
This is just me. It’s a long story, and I wrote about it for a freshman comp class at Belmont many years ago. This story doesn’t begin, “Once upon a time,” but like this:
I never really liked lasagna in the first place. Initially, I thought that someone was conducting an autopsy in the church’s fellowship hall. There were rows and rows of steel pans, each containing steaming layers of thick, wet noodles that reminded me of folded flaps of dead skin. In between each layer were little white specks of cheese being pushed out of their hiding places by bubbling rivers of tomato sauce. The same sauce was splattered all over the top of the evil pie, but the soggy chunks of over-ripe tomatoes were more visible, more repulsive. The lasagna simply did not look good. But I was hungry, and the only chance I had to get control of my current headache was to eat. So I slapped a heaping spoonful of it on my plate, found my seat, and choked down every last bite.
That story doesn’t end well, either, with me puking into a plastic grocery bag in the front seat of some stranger’s new car on the way to the hospital and me subsequently dropping out of school, but I’ll spare you the details.
Suffice it to say that lasagna is from the devil. Even if Peyton Manning is the delivery boy.
3. Is this a joke?
I don’t know if I actually believe that this is actually a real product, but even the mere idea of squeeze bacon is about as wrong as you can get.
Bacon has to win the award for the food product with the highest variance. If it’s crispy, it’s . . . well, I don’t even have words to describe just how perfect a perfectly crispy slice of perfect bacon tastes. You’ve had one. You know.
But contrary to popular opinion, you can actually ruin bacon, and ruined bacon is the worst of the worst. Just about every fast food place gets this wrong by taking a perfectly good piece of bacon and barely warming it in the microwave before slapping it on some breakfast sandwich. It’s limp. Stringy. Practically still oinking.
It’s nasty, is what I’m saying.
The only thing I can think of that would be worse is making it into a puree, which appears to be what the good folks of Vilhelm Lilleflosk’s have done. For this, they deserve enough jail time to fully consider their offense against society. You don’t do that to bacon.
I mean, go look at that picture again. If I saw that in the wild, my first thought would be, “I think your dog has an ulcer.”
So, no. Not even Peyton Manning can make that look appealing.
What about you? What are three things not even Peyton Manning could sell you?
With 10 regular season games to go, the Vols are sitting pretty, but can move up or down this month. Tonight, they host LSU, which has lost four of its last five games and is down four players due to suspensions. The Tigers do have all of their starters, though, so don’t expect to see any depth advantage early. The game tips early tonight at 6:30 ET and will be broadcast on the SEC Network.
247Sports’ 16-click crystal ball slideshow suggests keeping an eye on 3-star defensive tackle Otito Obgonnia, 5-star linebacker Quay Walker, and 4-star cornerback Eddie Smith (although rumor has it that Smith is not happening). And DylanVol has a status update for us as well.
“Derek is one of the greatest rookies I’ve ever been around,” Cox said during a Super Bowl 52 media appearance. “He comes to work every day. He listens. He takes coaching. I can tell from his play from Day 1 and the way that he approaches everything up until now. You don’t see those technique mistakes or mental errors with him. Later in the season he was starting to catch up with the game, which is great for him.”
Schiano who? Meanwhile, Kirk Herbstreit is saying good things about Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt:
I think he’ll do a great job. Been around a lot of winning last 10 years or so. Outstanding recruiter. Relates well to players. Excited to see what he’ll build on Rocky Top. https://t.co/DkW0GFLVJX
