I used to play this game with my kids when we were traveling. Like most kids relegated to the back seat for long car trips, they would inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” When my patience waned, I would get creative just for my own sanity.

“I have bad news, kids. We’re not going to get there today. In fact, we will never get there. Because as soon as we get there, it won’t be there anymore. It’ll be here.”

That bought me at least another five minutes of peace while they processed the message. Hey, you take whatever amusement you can get on a 16-hour drive from the Tri-Cities to the frozen tundra of Minnesota.

What’s that have to do with Tennessee football? I’ll let you figure that out for yourself. It’s a long summer.

“Best meaningless games”

A couple of weeks ago, SI.com published an article entitled The Best Meaningless Games of the 2017 College Football Season. The piece caught my eye, of course, because Tennessee’s season-opener against Georgia Tech made the list, but I found it especially interesting for another reason entirely.

The use of the two-word phrase “best meaningless” presupposes two kinds of games: (1) those that are “meaningful” in that they in some way impact the race for a championship, and (2) those that don’t and yet have some value anyway.

Categorizing football games like that suggests that there are two primary things we’re watching and hoping for when the season kicks off: The Race and The Moments. One, however, is threatening to eat the other.

The Race

The ultimate goal of every team’s season, of course, is to win it all. We enter the season hoping our team will become the national champion. Failing that, a conference or divisional championship makes a nice consolation prize. We root for our team to not only win the games it plays but also to finish the season ahead of everyone else in the standings.

This is The Race. It’s awesome (if memory serves), because every game matters, and not just your own. Win any given Saturday, and on Sunday you’re checking your stride, your pace, your standing with respect to everyone else still in the hunt for the championship. Lose, and you start rooting for those ahead of you in the standings to stumble as well so that you can catch up. Each week, the pack of contenders thins out until there is only one remaining on the podium hoisting the trophy.

The Race adds a layer of excitement to the college football season. Unfortunately, it is reserved for the elites, those teams with some degree of reasonable expectation that they can contend with the others for the crown.

The Moments

There are other reasons to watch college football as well, and they can be either in addition to The Race or entirely independent of it. The college football season provides each team an opportunity to create Moments that make watching worthwhile.

Take Rivalry Week, for instance. The last week of the regular season each year is one of the best of the entire fall because it features games that matter for reasons that might be completely independent of The Race: Alabama-Auburn, Georgia-Georgia Tech, Clemson-South Carolina, Oregon-Oregon State, Washington-Washington State, Arizona-Arizona State, BYU-Utah, Florida-Florida State, Kentucky-Louisville, Michigan-Ohio State, just to name a few. Some of those games will impact The Race, but many will not, and they are all important to their respective fan bases. These kinds of games provide Moments worth watching even for teams no longer in contention for a championship.

Moments worth watching can arise out of other contexts as well. Close, dramatic games usually make the networks’ evening highlight reels for a reason, namely because they make for good stories to tell. That’s the reason last year’s Tennessee-Georgia Tech game made SI.com’s list of “best meaningless games” of the 2017 season. It was a back-and-forth event that was sent to overtime by a blocked field goal attempt and was ultimately decided by a single play in double overtime. Dramatic games make shorten your life expectancy, but they make for good Moments.

Moments worth watching can also occur in non-rivalry, non-dramatic games that don’t impact The Race. These include individual highlights in the form of athletic, acrobatic, ESPN Top 10-type plays that make you glad you saw them live.

The Impact of The Race on The Moments

Fans of teams that are actively engaged in The Race have it easy. They have legitimate expectations of competing for the crown, and, in addition, they’ll have the extra benefit of some memorable Moments along the way.

Fans of teams not in contention for The Race only have the Moments, but first they must decide how to process the irrelevancy of The Race.

The over/under for the Vols this fall is 5.5, meaning the experts think the team should win between five and six games. If correct, that win total will keep Tennessee out of contention for any kind of championship, whether it be national, conference, or divisional. It will make The Race irrelevant.

And it will likely do so swiftly. According to one source, the Vols are currently a 9.5-point underdog to season-opening opponent West Virginia. If that’s accurate, they’ll suffer a loss right out of the gate, and wins against ETSU and UTEP the following weeks will gain them no ground. Then comes a stretch of games against Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, and South Carolina that will likely result in a record of between 2-6 and 4-4, not exactly a championship resume. The Race will be run, but the Vols won’t be in contention.

For Tennessee fans interested only in The Race, their college football season will be over the day it begins.

Ugh. That doesn’t sound fun at all, but what’s the alternative?

There’s a Ted Talk from a guy named Matt Killingsworth that stands for the proposition that people who live in the moment are happier than those who don’t. He conducted a survey through an app that randomly pinged users to ask them a series of questions: How are they feeling at that moment? What were they doing at that moment? Were they thinking about something else at that moment? And if yes to the last question, was the thing they were thinking about pleasant, unpleasant, or neither?

After 650,000 responses, what he found was that our minds tend to wander from the moment 47% of the time, and when they did, participants were less happy than if they remained in the moment.

It wasn’t just that folks also tended to think about unpleasant things when they lived outside the moment, although that was true. The results were more surprising than that. Participants were unhappier even when they were already unhappy in the moment and daydreaming of something pleasant. In other words, what they thought about while mind-wandering mattered – thinking unpleasant things made them much unhappier than thinking about pleasant things – but mind-wandering always resulted in an unhappier state when compared to living in the moment. Killingsworth likened it to playing a slot machine where you could lose $50, $25, or $1. You’d never play that game.

Mind-wandering and college football

How might this apply to the context of college football? Might it be true that we spend half our time foregoing the moment and mind-wandering to The Race? Is it making us happier? Alabama fans might not even notice. In keeping with the slot machine illustration, they may be losing only $1. But Tennessee fans? Dwelling on The Race could be costing us 50 bucks a pop.

The same phenomenon that occurs within the context of an entire season may also happen within the context of any given game. Does thinking we know the outcome of the game before it starts negatively impact our ability to enjoy it? Do we think we’ll win? Know we’ll lose? Do these thoughts cause us to miss Moments?

No doubt, fans have a legitimate reason to be presently unhappy about a bad play, a bad loss, or a bad season. But if Killingsworth is right, entertaining unpleasant thoughts about the future impact of those things only makes it worse.

There is a time for considering and planning for the future, and there is a time for living in the moment. But the slot machine apparently costs either $1 or $50. We should probably figure out which, and only then decide whether playing is worth the cost.

We’re all daydreaming of the day that Jeremy Pruitt and Phillip Fulmer get the Vols back to running, and winning, The Race.

We don’t know when that moment will arrive, but we do know that it is sometime in the future.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re never going to get there. Because as soon as we get there, we’ll be here.

Where will our minds be?

 

“Worst” is subjective, of course. When we did this eight years ago at Rocky Top Talk, “most heartbreaking” was the language we chose. As I wrote Wednesday, turns out heartbreak is also subjective. It doesn’t feel right to tag the toughest losses of the last decade with heartbreak, because that’s typically reserved for stakes bigger than the Vols have played for since 2007. We’ll just go with worst; I’m taking into consideration both how it felt at the time and how it feels today. Here are my picks for the ten worst losses during Tennessee’s decade-long struggle:

10. 2017 Florida

When Tyrie Cleveland caught that pass, I laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever had that reaction to a Tennessee loss before, especially not one on the final play of the game. But this game felt like the summation of everything the Vols had struggled with under Butch Jones: overly infatuated with a close game, an inability to create a successful offensive snap in a crucial situation despite multiple chances, Florida snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. There are more colorful examples of all three further up the list. The ending here felt both unexpected and appropriate. And ultimately, as the 2017 season faded into 4-8 infamy, this loss didn’t matter as much. It wasn’t the difference between success and failure, or Jones keeping his job. It hurt plenty in the moment, but was simply the first chapter of a story we were already dreading.

9. 2008 UCLA

When you wait all summer for college football and your team is coming off an SEC East title, it hurts real bad to lose on opening night. Especially when the other team throws four interceptions in the first half. No one needs to hear me talk about the Clawfense any more; the numbers from this box score (Crompton 19-of-41, Foster & Hardesty 162 yards on only 25 carries) are burned in my brain. The beginning of the end.

8. 2014 Florida

Josh Dobbs is the reason this game doesn’t rank higher for me. He changed the narrative of the 2014 season and the trajectory of the program against South Carolina later that year, one of the most endearing and enduring victories of these last ten seasons. But on this day, Tennessee had seven snaps inside the Florida 20 in the third quarter, and none of them gained a single yard. Two field goals and an interception later, a 3-0 lead was only 9-0, and as we all remember, that wasn’t enough.

7. 2016 South Carolina

This season is still exhausting to think about. The range of emotions from the end of the Georgia game, through the end of the Texas A&M game (the kind of game that definitely makes the list when the Vols are consistently good around it), through getting decimated by Alabama…to this loss. From “team of destiny!” to a defeat that was actually encouraging against A&M, to chalking it up to injuries and Alabama while still having tangible success in front of you…and then it was simply all gone at South Carolina. A steep fall indeed, one Jones wouldn’t recover from.

6. 2015 Oklahoma

Despite the frustrating loss to Florida in 2014, the program was trending in the right direction and Oklahoma was the golden opportunity for Tennessee to announce its return to the national landscape. And man, it felt like that was happening at halftime. But in the third quarter, Tennessee had four drives featuring a 1st-and-10 at their own 44 or better. And those four sequences featured no gains greater than one yard. One missed field goal, three punts, and some heroics from Baker Mayfield later, and the Sooners stole the victory as the Vols blew a three-possession lead for the first time in almost 30 years.

5. 2010 LSU

4. 2010 North Carolina

Remember when these two happened and we thought they would represent the worst things would get for a long time? Eight years later, I think the North Carolina one is worse. Not only did we think we had won for a longer period of time, the LSU screw-up was our fault for having a billion men on the field. The UNC loss can still be blamed in part on the referee not standing over the ball while the Tar Heels substituted, and now college football has the Derek Dooley rule to prevent such a thing from happening again. The unique experience of celebrating a victory before ultimately losing twice in one season is enough to keep these two in the top five.

3. 2011 Kentucky

I can excuse 2008 Wyoming for a number of reasons, and losses like 2017 Georgia or plenty to Alabama can be chalked up to, “They were a lot better than us.” But this one, to me, still stands out. 4-7 Kentucky with a wide receiver playing quarterback and 217 yards of offense broke a 26-year winning streak for Tennessee in this series, costing the Vols bowl eligibility and Derek Dooley almost all the goodwill he had left.

2. 2012 Florida

Perhaps not one you think of right away when going back through the last ten years. But if I’m thinking back to the way I felt at the end of the game? There’s been little worse than this: all the Fulmer-Kiffin-Dooley stuff, back in the Top 25 for the first time since the slide began, and more than anything, the fragile hope that the 2012 team could actually get us back. Midway through the third quarter, it felt like it was going to happen. And then: 80-yard touchdown, interception, 45-yard gain, 23-yard touchdown, Florida up 27-20, and a few drives later a 75-yard touchdown was added on for good measure. Walking out of that stadium I remember very clearly thinking two things: this team won’t be the one to get us back, and now we’re going to have to wait at least three more years to try. I haven’t written after terrible losses because of my grandmother’s death (2016 South Carolina) or our son’s birth (2017 Georgia). But this is the only loss I remember not writing anything for because it simply felt like there was nothing to say except, “We’re going to have to wait another three years.”

1 2015 Florida

We’ll talk in a moment about where this game goes on a list of most heartbreaking losses beyond these last ten years. But within the last ten years, this one, by far, is at the top for me. Beyond the streak and the individual madness of 4th-and-14 are the failures on both sides of the ball. You’ve got multiple fourth down conversions allowed, infamously not going for two, and a final drive after 4th-and-14 when Tennessee had two timeouts and 1:26 but somehow ran only five plays before settling for a 55-yard field goal attempt. And of all the losses on this list, this one was by far the most costly. 2016 South Carolina might have cost the Vols the East. But we know this one did, in a year when Tennessee took two playoff teams to the wire. If any one of a dozen things goes differently in this game, Tennessee breaks the streak a year early, and Josh Dobbs and company get their rings and another shot at Alabama. But alas.

Where would we put any of these on a longer list? Using our 2010 list of the worst losses from 1990-2009, I’d add only one to that Top 10. But I would put 2015 Florida way up there:

Worst Losses 1990-2017

1. 2001 LSU (SEC Championship)
2. 1990 Alabama
3. 2015 Florida
4. 2001 Georgia
5. 1999 Arkansas
6. 2000 Florida
7. 1993 Alabama (tied)
8. 1996 Memphis
9. 2007 LSU (SEC Championship)
10. 1995 Florida

Three years later, I think 2015 Florida is worse than the Hobnailed Boot. This is mostly because the Hobnailed Boot didn’t hurt us in the end: if not for the number one game on that list, the Vols are playing for the BCS Championship despite the loss to Georgia.

That’s our list. What’s yours?

 

In the quiet of the early summer, we’ve often spent time with Tennessee’s history. Way back in the summer of 2009 at Rocky Top Talk, we counted down the 50 Best Games of the Fulmer Era. The following year we looked at Tennessee’s 20 Most Heartbreaking Losses from 1990-2009. I’ve been going back through the latter this week, comparing some of our toughest losses in the nine years since to see where they might rank. We’ll do that exercise in full later this week, but I want to start with one game in particular.

I was a history major; even as an idiot optimist, I believe there is value in examining our toughest defeats. But what qualifies a game for that list can and will change, specifically based on the quality and quantity of victory surrounding it.

Case in point: how do you feel about this game, nine years later?

So it’s still no fun to watch, of course. But how do you think of it in the context of the last ten years?

When we did our original list of the 20 most heartbreaking losses from 1990-2009, we ranked this game #11, and almost apologized for having it that low. Recency bias was a factor, even with Lane Kiffin out and Derek Dooley in when we did the original list. But in the summer of 2010, we placed it above heart-breakers like the 1990 tie with Auburn and four Florida losses (1996, 1997, 1999, 2002).

This week, when I was putting together my list of the ten worst losses of the last ten years, it didn’t even make the cut.

To be fair, there are more losses to choose from in the last ten years than in the 20 preceding them. That’s literally true, by the way: from 1989-2007 the Vols lost 54 times, plus their first six of the 1988 season. From 2008-2017, the Vols lost 63 times.

But here too, it’s both quantity and quality that count. Tennessee has not had much opportunity for the kind of heartbreak that dominated our old list. How we experience defeat has changed. Our worst losses used to make us mourn what we gave away. Now they make us wonder if we’ll ever get it back.

In 2009, that loss to #1 Alabama was heartbreaking. But it’s not just the sequence of events, the ranking, or the rival. In 2009, we were still attached to the idea of who Tennessee had been for all those years prior. Lane Kiffin’s 45-19 win over Georgia two weeks earlier helped us do that. And the loss to Alabama didn’t take it away; even at 7-6 at the end of the season, fans were very optimistic Kiffin could get the Vols where we wanted to go. Two losses to the number one team in the country, two others by four points each, and a bowl loss to a Virginia Tech team that finished the year fourth in S&P+. We rioted, in part, because we believed in what was happening up until the very moment it was over. And today we enjoy comparing the makeup of Jeremy Pruitt’s staff to Kiffin’s.

In the moment, the 2009 Alabama loss belongs on a list of painful near misses from a championship-caliber Tennessee program. But nine years later, 2009 isn’t the bridge between Fulmer and Kiffin on the straight and narrow road of victory. It’s Exit 2A into the ditch, and there aren’t even any good gas stations.

The program’s inability to sustain success over a decade cut a hard tie from the past, and instead created an era of its own. Viewed through the lens of 2009, the loss to Alabama is heartbreaking. Viewed through the lens of the last decade, it’s a near-miss moral victory akin to 2013 Georgia. The Vols played an equally competitive game with an equally good Alabama squad in Tuscaloosa in 2015, and I don’t think any of us would put it on a list of the ten worst losses of the last ten years either.

Losing always hurts. But it’s not just that the stakes have been lower for most of the last ten years. It’s that this ditch is long and muddy, and you need really good vision to still see the shiny objects in our rear view. At some point it became normal, and our definitions of great wins and bad losses changed based on our surroundings.

The funny thing here isn’t really funny, because we’re putting enough hope in it to take it very seriously: we asked Phillip Fulmer to get out of the car when it was teetering on the edge. Opinions still vary over how many tires were in the ditch back then. And now, after trying and failing in unique and messy ways over the course of almost a decade, Fulmer has the keys again and got to pick the driver. And when in doubt at any point over the last six months, it’s Fulmer’s presence – a shiny object out of the rear view and riding shotgun – that gives me the most hope.

There’s some mud and messiness left, no doubt. Jeremy Pruitt will chase forward progress, with wins and losses along the way this year and beyond. I hope he gets us to a point when losing to #1 Alabama by two points hurts just as much nine years later as the day it happened. And I hope for wins with an even longer memory.

 

 

Um, that report that Tennessee linebacker Darrin Kirkland Jr. would be leaving Rocky Top for another school as a graduate transfer? Never mind (maybe):

Would expect formal announcement this week @SEC meetings in Destin, but was told late last night Darrin Kirkland Jr., with his family, met w/ Pruitt & is likely to remain @ UT

— John Brice (@JohnDBrice1) May 28, 2018

As I said, maybe. We’ll see. Who knows?

If true, it’s great news. It’s odd, though. The report that Kirkland was leaving came straight from his own Twitter account. That account has since been deleted. So, all we have is a tweet from the guy himself from an account that has now been nuked, and a subsequent tweet from a guy based on an unnamed source that the guy has changed his mind.

Intrigue!

As I said in our post earlier this week, we’d mentioned in our Vols preseason magazine just how important Kirkland’s healthy return could be to the team, and I still believe that. If he has reconsidered after meeting with both his family and Pruitt, then that’s a good thing for the team.

 

It’s easy to remember Peyton Manning, Reggie White, Doug Atkins and Johnny Majors for their on-the-field achievements, and they all have legitimate reasons for having their names and jersey numbers enshrined, retired and hanging on the facades of Neyland Stadium for the rest of time.

But you may not know that much about Bill Nowling, Rudy Klarer, Willis Tucker and Clyde “Ig” Fuson, whose Nos. 32, 49, 61 and 62 hang alongside those of the other four. It’s their contributions off the field that led to former athletic director Mike Hamilton’s decision to retire their numbers for good in 2006.

It was one of the few good things Hamilton did as UT AD.

Because, while Manning, White, Atkins and Majors may have been Tennessee legends, Nowling, Klarer, Tucker and Fuson are national legends. They paid the ultimate sacrifice, dying for our country in battle so that we can remain free.

This Memorial Day, while we are all enjoying our lake trips and weenie roasts, we need to remember what the holiday is actually for. And, it would be good for you as a Tennessee fan to remember a little about the four former Vols who left this world ensuring we can have the same rights we enjoy today in ours.

Hopefully one day when your child is sitting beside you in Neyland Stadium — hopefully watching a worthwhile football team again — and he or she looks up and asks you about these men, you’ll be able to tell them a bit about them.

 

Back in 2009 on our old Rocky Top Talk site, I wrote essentially this same article in our “100 Days of Vols” series. I’m writing it again. It will never be enough to say thank you. Then, I wrote:

Bill Nowling, Rudy Klarer, Willis Tucker and Clyde Fuson are names that don’t immediately come to mind when you think of the Tennessee greats. A few years ago when we counted down the top 100 Vols of all-time on my old blog, 3rd Saturday in Blogtober, none of those guys made the list. But they’re the biggest heroes to ever wear the orange and white.

Nowling (No. 32), Klarer (No. 49), Tucker (No. 61) and Fuson (No. 62) gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom in World War II. They died so we could be free and so we could stand out there today, eat hot dogs, have cold beverages, shoot fireworks and practice our beliefs — whatever they may be. They died for more than a petty football game. It’s easy in the South for football to be “life” and “death.” We talk about plays killing us and about the field of battle and use all these sports cliches to describe what we see on those yard lines.

But a lot of us have no idea what true battle, true war, is. The ones of us who do know that a football game is just a football game.War is war. Life is life. And when you put that precious life on the line for a bunch of strangers, and you lose that life, that’s the most selfless act imaginable. Nowling, Klarer, Tucker and Fuson did that. For you. For me.

UTSports.com provided a little information on them all when they were honored back in ’06.

Nowling played from 1940-42 for General Robert Neyland (whose rich war history you should read about, as well). According to the article, Nowling was a three-year starter at the all-important position of fullback. In ’40, the Vols were the national champions, and Nowling was a big part of that. Those were some of the best teams in school history. Just how good?

The Vols lost just four games during Nowling’s three seasons.Nowling was a St. Petersburg, Florida, native who died August 9, 1944, while serving in World War II at the age of 23.

Klarer was a teammate of Nowling who played in 1941-42. He started in his final year for the Vols after serving as a backup his first season.

The native of Louisville, Kentucky, was a key member of the 1943 Sugar Bowl champions, but he left the team immediately after the win over Tulsa for Officer’s Training in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, according to the UTSports.com article. “Klarer was a 2nd Lieutenant and platoon leader in Germany during World War II. He was killed in action on Feb. 6, 1945, and Klarer received the Silver Star citation posthumously,” the article states.

Tucker was a hometown boy, a Knoxville High School graduate who played two years on the offensive line for a pair of dominant UT squads in 1939 and ’40.

He was a backup at center and guard on the undefeated ’39 team, and then Tucker earned a letter on the national championship team the next year while also standing out as a sprinter for the track team. Tucker, who was named the top track athlete in Tennessee from 1900-50, lost just two games during his career at Rocky Top, and never lost a regular season game, according to the UTSports.com article.

Tucker was killed in action in Germany just prior to the Battle of the Bulge on Nov. 28, 1944, at the age of 26.

Finally, Fuson played just one season for the Vols, sharing time with Nowling at fullback on the 1942 team that finished 9-1-1.  He, like Klarer, was a Kentucky native, hailing from Middlesboro. He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and was killed in action in Germany on Dec. 4, 1944, while serving with the 84th Infantry Division.

“These four courageous men made the ultimate sacrifice for this country,” Hamilton said at the time he made the decision to retire the numbers. “We recognized them in the past, but this is a good opportunity for us to recognize their families on the field. It is of significance the ceremony will be during the Air Force game, when UT plays one of the many honorable branches of the military.”

These four men are legendary, just as are the others who died fighting for us throughout the years. Hollywood may glamorize death, but those that come in battle are often gruesome, gritty and heartbreaking to those left behind. It’s easy to think of football as a safe haven, no matter how violent it is, but the bottom line is these are 18-22-year-old kids “battling” on our television sets. During World War II, these were the same kids who were dying by the thousands on foreign soil.

So, enjoy your day off tomorrow. Enjoy all the trappings of freedom that we have. But find a soldier and thank him or her for the sacrifices they and their families make every single day. Then think of those who didn’t make it home to hug their loved ones one last time.

We may “live and die” with every Vols play. But these men literally died protecting us, preserving our way of life and honoring what it means to be an American. Thank you all, gentlemen — and to all the ladies and gentlemen who serve us still.

You are the legends, in the truest sense of the world.

Vols linebacker Darrin Kirkland Jr. announced via Twitter late this afternoon that he is electing to leave Tennessee for another school as a graduate transfer:

Lord please guide me on this journey 🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/80WJaxV7Se

— Darrin ‘DK’ Kirkland (@KIRK_Era) May 24, 2018

 

First of all, best of luck to Kirkland.

But there’s no getting around it: This is a big loss for Tennessee. Here’s what we wrote about Kirkland in our Vols preseason magazine this year:

Perhaps the biggest key to the success of the Tennessee
linebacking corps this fall is the return of Kirkland. Kirkland
made the All-SEC Freshman Team in 2015 after playing
in all 13 games and starting 10 of them. After injuring his
ankle in the second game of the 2016 season, he played in
only eight games and wasn’t the same even when he was on
the field. Last fall, a knee injury in fall camp sidelined him
for the entire season. This offseason, he had another minor
knee surgery, but made it back onto the practice field late in
spring camp. He’s expected to be back and healthy this fall,
but whether he can stay that way is the question weighing on
everyone’s minds. If he can, he will be a difference-maker.

So much for that.

And so much for Brad’s “Hey, at least nobody’s transferred!” post from yesterday. Yes, we’re blaming him, and so should you.