Category Archives: Football

For a few of us, the 2018 season kicked over the weekend (Duquesne at UMass baby!). For the rest of us, now it’s game week: everyone’s undefeated, and everyone can dream.

Tennessee’s dreams have been some combination of strange and brief for a long time now. Standing in the way this fall are a Top 20 opener, annual rivalries with the present-and-perhaps-future kings of college football, and the annoying habit of drawing one of the best teams from the SEC West that isn’t Alabama. All of this on the heels of the program’s first eight-loss season and, even more, the worst S&P+ rating of any SEC team when it made its most recent coaching change. Another dream might meet another quick death this fall. The potential for adding another year on that tab might make us wonder if it’s healthy to dream at all.

Along those lines, the last ten years have made me less attached to the head coach, though I’m not sure one can totally escape such attachments no matter where you fall on the spectrum from fan to fanatic. For me it’s one part self-preservation: Lane Kiffin, Derek Dooley, and Butch Jones were all exhausting to defend in their own ways.

But at the same time, what has given me the most comfort and confidence in the last nine months is the presence of Phillip Fulmer. He is, for sure, a coach I was incredibly attached to in all of our younger days. But it’s also because of something I remember most from when those days came to an end:

(from November 3, 2008 at SouthEastern Sports Blog)

Doug Matthews was on Sports Talk earlier today, and made this point: Nick Saban is a fantastic coach, but he’s not personally invested in the University of Alabama the way that Phillip Fulmer was and is invested in the University of Tennessee. Not even close.

Urban Meyer’s not. Neither is Les Miles or Mark Richt.

And the next man who comes in here won’t be either.

Meyer and Miles have won National Championships. And we absolutely hope whoever comes in here next will do the same.

But what we gave away today we won’t find again.

Butch Jones and Lane Kiffin were from somewhere else, Derek Dooley the son of Georgia royalty. Jeremy Pruitt is from the opposite of here.

But there remains no one more personally invested in Tennessee Football than the person who hired him.

There are never any guarantees; we already asked Fulmer to leave once. But as the Vols lost both games and trust in record numbers last fall, he was the only choice, and in all the right ways. I don’t know if or when the Vols will get back to winning like the 1990’s again. But I do find it easier to trust something good is possible with someone so personally invested back in the decision-making chair. That much of what we lost is found again. And it’s valuable, at least to me.

We do all this every year because we love the Vols. Even when they don’t win. But now it’s a little easier to have faith, or at least it feels a little more right. And Fulmer hired hope, an unproven risk/reward coach even though safe and easy options were on the board. The ultimate goal hasn’t changed for us, because it certainly hasn’t changed for him. And it’s one Pruitt knows quite well as an assistant coach.

All of that is down the road, but we can dream its dream. This is Week One. This week we don’t have to worry about how long we’ve been gone. This week everything is new, just as it feels the right kind of old.

And this week is about all of us pulling in the same direction, something we haven’t enjoyed for more than a few short weeks in a very long time. I don’t know how far Jeremy Pruitt and the 2018 Vols will go this fall. He’ll earn some level of trust along the way. But after a season when the rope slipped through our fingers faster than ever, then threatened to unravel entirely? Now we get a chance to pick it back up again, together in more than name only. This is the week to grab the rope. Set your feet. And by God pull.

It’s here.

This week, in Charlotte, in Knoxville, and wherever you listen…it’s football time in Tennessee.

If you’ve ever devoted much time to reading business/management/self-improvement books, you’ve probably heard the story about the IBM employee who feared he was going to be terminated after making a mistake that cost the company several million dollars. His boss told him that there was no way they were going to fire him now because they had just spent several million dollars educating him.

Whether that actually happened, I don’t know, and it’s probably worth pointing out that the guy to whom this is usually attributed is former IBM CEO Tom Watson, who reportedly also once said that the world only needed five computers. Reports that he actually said that are also dubious, by the way.

Regardless, the reason the story is often repeated in business and management circles is that it drives home an undeniable truth: Mistakes can be valuable because of the education and experience they create.

Mistakes, investments, and goodwill accounts

The trick, of course, is to make sure that the mistake-maker actually leverages his blunder into useful experience and that he achieves and then maintains a positive ledger before his time runs out and his account of goodwill runs dry.

College football coaches are well acquainted with this notion. If progress and success are deposits stored up with their bosses and fans, then mistakes (and losses generally, over time) are withdrawals. Withdrawals can be the equivalent of a little spending money or they can be major catastrophes to the balance of the account. Spend more than you have, and you’re overdrawn. No coach can remain overdrawn for long, no matter the size of his opening balance.

Tennessee football is in a rebuilding phase, and in that sense, it’s kind of like a startup, flush with stacks of crisp new $100 bills. In essence, Jeremy Pruitt begins his Tennessee tenure with a generous loan. The opening balance funds the “honeymoon” period, and the expectation is that he will make more withdrawals than deposits for some period of time.

Goodwill management

Pruitt’s primary goal for the immediate future, then, is to manage his stash of investment goodwill well. He’ll have some opportunities to increase his balance by having his team do well, and if he can capitalize on those opportunities, it will be good for everyone involved.

But mostly, he’s going to be on a bit of a spending spree for a while, and he’ll have to make the most of it. With a tough year looming, he can spend what he needs to, but he can’t burn through it like a prodigal lottery winner with a few hundred new friends.

Mistake management

As a brand new head coach in the SEC, Pruitt’s going to make some mistakes this year.

As a weary fan base, so will we.

What all of that costs depends largely on how well those mistakes are managed.

Football seasons are funny things. We fans tell ourselves before the season begins, when the numbers are sterile and devoid of emotion and pain, that a six-loss season is a reasonable goal. We tell ourselves that we expect mistakes to be made and that it’s just part of the process that we’re prepared to endure for a while.

And then we actually witness those mistakes in all of their gory glory while in a heightened state of emotion, and logic and reason fly out the window as quickly as regrettable words fly out of our mouths. It’s one thing to predict just one more L in the win/loss column. It’s another thing entirely to watch a rival receiver get behind the entire defense to grab a game-winning, 63-yard touchdown pass with 9 seconds left in a tie game. The letter “L” doesn’t make you raise your voice. Watching your team gift wrap a miracle to a hated rival — again! — will make you scream bloody murder.

Jeremy Pruitt’s job this fall is not to make no mistakes. He’s a new head coach with a steep learning curve ahead of him, and he’s going to do some things that cause us pain.

What he does need to do, though, is minimize his mistakes and learn from the ones he makes.

As fans, our support for Pruitt need not be unconditional. We don’t need to give him a free pass for his mistakes, and we aren’t expected to endure forever mistakes that are never leveraged into education, experience, and, in due time, success.

But the temptation to overcharge, to price-gouge Pruitt’s goodwill account in the emotional aftermath of an early mistake or two is coming, and we would be wise to resist it.

If you read only one thing about the Vols today . . .

. . . make it the 2018 edition of Will’s ever-awesome Idiot Optimist’s Guide:

• The Idiot Optimist’s Guide to the 2018 Season

Other Vols stuff worth reading today

1. Rucker: Older, wiser Jonathan Kongbo easier to believe in for Tennessee Vols football, via 247Sports
2. Why Somebody Must Stand Up in Tennessee’s Quarterback Derby, via Gameday on Rocky Top
3. Tennessee Vols Baylen Buchanan confident talented secondary, via 247Sports
4. WVU football closing in on 2018 season-opener against Tennessee, via 247Sports
5. Tennessee DBs eager to play in Pruitt’s ‘in-your-face’ defense, via 247Sports
6. Tennessee Vols Football: Injury bug keeps biting at West Virginia, via 247Sports
7. The Fumble that kept Vols’ national title run on track almost never happened, via Saturday Down South
8. Tennessee Vols Football: Phillip Fulmer remembers emotional final moments of 1998 title game, via 247Sports

Behind the paywalls

• Tennessee Mailbag: What is the impact of Jeremy Pruitt…, via The Athletic
• Tennessee Vols football practice observations, via 247Sports

Did you know the Vols are 500-to-1 to win the national championship? That’s life-changing money, boys!

Listen, I’ve already got the basketball Vols at 25-to-1 to win it all. Those winnings are set aside to get right with the debt collectors and the Lord, so it’s all limousine ridin’ and jet flyin’ with the rest. My wife had already been telling me I should pay less attention to Butch Jones and more to Rick Barnes long before last fall went right down the drain. And when Admiral dunked that ball at Rupp Arena, I asked her right then and there if we could name our first child Private First Class. She did not go for that, but she’s got an SEC Championship t-shirt in the closet, by God. And you’d better clear out some room for the Pruitt collection.

I mean, with Phillip at the helm, it don’t much matter who the coach is. Only took us a decade to figure that one out. And whenever CPF (ADPF?) decides to retire to Wyoming with a fistful of championships, we can simplify the search process. If you want to involve the common man and the common fan, you don’t have to schedule an on-campus riot to do it. Just get one of us a spot on the search committee. Then have the prospective new AD start down their list of hypothetical coaching candidates. If our first response is, “Who’s that?”, “(Fulmerized) no!”, or “…wait, what?”, you don’t hire that person. Something that simple could’ve saved us from Derek Dooley, Butch Jones, and Greg Schiano.

But we don’t need saving anymore. Fulmer’s bringing championships to the entire athletic department. You do know the only reason we didn’t win the NCAA Tournament is because we got beat by God, right? But only by one point! If Sister Jean’s reward is a Final Four appearance for a mid-major, I know we’re due at least six national championships. She turned 99 this week, and I hope that lady has lots of time left on this earth. But I hope she also knows that in heaven, it’s John Ward and Bill Anderson on the call.

Look man, Jeremy Pruitt got the Tennessee job, got out there ‘cruitin’, then held Clemson’s offense to 2.69 yards per play in his spare time. Remember how excited you were when we signed Kyle Phillips, Shy Tuttle, Jonathan Kongbo, Darrin Kirkland, Nigel Warrior…I mean, basically our entire defense? Now think about them in this guy’s hands. What’s the record for fewest first downs in a season? Wait, is it the Clawfense?

Then on offense, nevermind who’s playing quarterback, this year they’ll have actual coaching! Imagine that! And Florida State fans still believe they’d’ve won the title in ’98 if Chris Weinke was healthy, but he’s not even good enough to coach our QBs! But really, here’s all the coaching they need: get the ball to the guy who wore Gator-skin boots to the postgame, then caught a hail mary, then told the truth about our previous administration IN LANGUAGE THE INTERIM COACH COULD UNDERSTAND. Get the ball to Jauan, and Weinke won’t have the only Heisman on the property. It doesn’t even matter that we could start all four-and-five-stars on the offensive line. One of them is Trey Smith, and he’s been waiting all year to hit somebody. Good luck, West Virginia.

And look, I fully respect a man who refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation atop his head. I’m a Holgo man. West Virginians are our Appalachian brethren. But the Mountaineers are Diet Tennessee: looks the same, tastes kinda the same but mostly worse, zero national championships.

Then we get Randy Sanders’s ETSU program, who will change their mascot to the screen pass by the end of the year if they haven’t already. But I think they could take UTEP, who went 0-12 last year but only lost 11 of them by at least 14 points.

When I close my eyes and dream, I see the four game winning streak we should be on against the Gators. Instead, we lost once because we wet the bed in the red zone, once because we gave up a 4th-and-17, and once on a hail mary. And that’s just the Cliffs Notes. But one in a row is better than none in a row. Do you know the last Tennessee coach to beat the Gators on his very first try? Phillip By God Fulmer. And never you mind that new coach in Gainesville, the same truth still applies: they ain’t no good. Vols by 30, unless we decide to win 20-17 in overtime as a tribute. And don’t worry, that means we can pay tribute to 1998 against Georgia by keeping them out of the end zone altogether. But I do appreciate the Dawgs helping us move along with our coaching search last fall.

Then it’s Auburn, who beat Alabama last year because the Tide had 1st-and-10 inside the Auburn 40 on their last three drives and scored zero points. That’s not Jeremy’s fault! Sounds like a Saban problem to me. I’m sure their new intern can solve that one. If you don’t think the Pruitt-for-Butch trade makes Tennessee over Alabama the lock of the century, I don’t know what to tell you. How many life championships are Bama fans claiming by now? I can’t keep giving out these winners for free!

We’ve owed Will Muschamp a punch in the face for like six years now, and finally have the coaching staff that will encourage that sort of behavior, metaphorically speaking, instead of being satisfied that we’re close enough to put our hands on them but let’s see what happens in the fourth quarter. Then we play the 49ers, which might’ve been a good game back in the 80’s but I’m not sold on the Garoppolo kid yet. He does have the advantage of moving as far away as physically possible from Tom Brady, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Kentucky? Wait til basketball season. Missouri? I’ve been hoping we’d schedule the Cowboys for years, this is a much easier way to get a piece of Derek Dooley. Vanderbilt? Swept them in basketball too! It don’t matter who we see in Atlanta since we’ll’ve already beaten the two best teams in the division. But in the playoff, I’m pulling for Ohio State, Florida Atlantic, and of course, Wake Forest. Since we’re guaranteed a shot at Butch Jones and Derek Dooley already, I figure we can just go ahead and cleanse our palate altogether.

15-0, National Champions, boys. Then we’re going after that single-season college basketball wins record, which is currently held by three John Calipari teams (or two teams and an asterisk). Get your tattoos now, boys. And don’t tell my wife I already did.

Hey look, only took me nine years to learn about GIFs!

via GIPHY

September 1 will be Tennessee’s 13th season opener against a ranked non-conference foe (thanks, as always, to the folks behind Tennessee’s media guide). Fun fact: five of those were against UCLA, from the first one in 1967 through Peyton Manning’s debut in 1994. The Vols are 5-4-3 in those games overall, most recently splitting a pair with California in 2006-07.

But when you’ve struggled like the Vols in the last decade, you don’t need a ranked opener to raise the stakes. Tennessee has had plenty of tense first tests in the last few years, many of them made so by uncertainty surrounding the head coach. Jeremy Pruitt will get the best kind of uncertainty – new coach, first game – against West Virginia. It’s the first impression, but it’s also a Top 20 opponent some are projecting far higher than that.

How will the first game set the tone for Jeremy Pruitt and 2018? How does it compare to some of the other season openers in recent memory in terms of anticipation and anxiety going in?

Level 1: The Sure Thing

• 2004 UNLV, 1999 & 2002 Wyoming, FCS Opponents

Lane Kiffin, Derek Dooley, and Butch Jones all opened their UT coaching careers with FCS opponents. In FBS/Division 1-A, you have to go back to the special jersey night game against UNLV to find a sure-thing opponent that actually played itself out that way. UAB the following year certainly felt like one going in.

Level 2: The Pseudo-Sure Thing

• 2016 Appalachian State, 2015 Bowling Green, 2008 UCLA, 2007 California

A successful season, or at least a successful finish in the prior year, often creates overconfidence in the season opener. With Butch Jones it was capable mid-majors who were overlooked in part because of massive Week 2 opportunities in Oklahoma and Bristol. Phillip Fulmer’s last two teams opened on the road with Pac-12 opponents, one the Vols torched the year before and one the Clawfense was expected to torch. The lesson: never overlook a team with a pulse in week one.

Level 3: I Have No Idea

• 2000 Southern Miss, 1998 Syracuse, 1994 UCLA

You have to go back almost two decades, but all three of these were some form of rebuild/reload against ranked opponents, two of them on the road. The ’94 Vols were replacing their starting tailback, both wide receivers, and the Heisman runner-up at quarterback. The ’98 Vols were replacing the next Heisman runner-up, along with several key defensive pieces. And in 2000, most of the pieces from that championship run were gone. It was a testament to the strength of Tennessee’s program that the Vols went 2-1 in these games, all of them close. Tennessee’s performance in these openers didn’t necessarily color the entire season (other than Jerry Colquitt’s injury in ’94), but did create a first impression that was ultimately reliable. West Virginia probably goes in this tier: the game shouldn’t be confused for a toss-up with the Vols at +9.5, but we know so little about Tennessee in the midst of starting over I feel like there’s more to learn here than just the outcome.

Level 4: I’m Nervous

• 2017 Georgia Tech, 2014 Utah State, 2003 Fresno State

Disappointing season the year before + opponent you feel like you should beat but not blow out + additional anxiety you know will come if you lose = these openers, the rare kind that can create more anxiety than anticipation. The Vols were solid against Fresno in ’03, surprisingly good against Chuckie Keeton and Utah State in ’14, and we all remember the full spectrum of emotions that came with the Butch Jones experience last year. The stakes for losing a game like this are so high it creates a, “Why did we schedule these guys?” mentality, even though those decisions are made far before we know what kind of anxiety/anticipation we’ll be feeling leading up to kickoff.

Level 5: Everything is on the line!

• 2012 NC State, 2006 California

The ol’ let’s make decisions about the future of the program opener, when a disastrous season the year before and a capable opponent in the first game create a tense situation. The Vols went 2-0 in these games, though one was a false positive. Looking at things this way gives me additional appreciation for what the Vols did to Cal in 2006. It’s the fantasy we’d like to come true every time we play a significant opponent in the season opener; fortunately the West Virginia game doesn’t carry the same burden of the fate of the program at stake.

It’s only the first impression, but it will be a meaningful one for Jeremy Pruitt and this Tennessee team. Where does it rank for you in terms of anticipation and anxiety?