Gameday on Rocky Top

Here’s the Week 13 college football TV schedule, curated for Vols fans. As always, it includes kickoff times, TV stations, and what might be of interest to a Vols fan, along with helpful suggestions on how to watch everything most efficiently and who to root for in each game. We’ve also tossed in Vols hoops this week.

The full (football) schedule for the entire weekend is also included at the bottom of the post.

Go Vols!

Tuesday-Thursday, November 21-23

As far as we know, Dan Mullen is still in play to be Tennessee’s next head coach, so Thursday provides a chance to kick his tires a bit. Plus, if you haven’t checked out Vols hoops yet, you should. They’re fun to watch, and they have at least one really good opportunity to build a nice resume Wednesday, and, depending on how Wednesday goes, perhaps another one Thursday.

Friday, November 24

On tap on Black Friday? More hoops, plus a bunch of Tennessee football coaching candidate watching. I don’t know how viable of a candidate Gary Patterson is, but you get a chance to watch him in action at noon, and then at 3:30, we get a look at both Charlie Strong and Scott Frost. The Nebraska game at 4:00 made the curated list because of the fragile hope that the Huskers have such a huge win that they decide not to fire their coach and therefore miss out on alum Scott Frost.

Saturday, November 25

I LOVE rivalry week, and this is a good one, with a couple of games featuring ranked rivals going at each other. The Iron Bowl, in particular, should be fun to watch. Plus, there are a ton of opportunities to watch Vols coaching candidates in action. Oh, and the Vols send out their seniors against Vanderbilt at 4:00 on the SECN.

Noon slot

At noon, there’s a big game between ranked rivals Ohio State and Michigan that also features a Tennessee coaching candidate in Buckeyes’ defensive coordinator Greg Schiano. There are also a handful of other coaching candidates in action, plus a chance to see if Georgia might have some trouble with Georgia Tech’s flexbone offense.

Afternoon slot

In the afternoon slot, an absolutely huge Iron Bowl will test your devotion to the Vols. There are a couple of other coaching candidates to watch as well, but there’s too much competition to really pay much attention to them unless you want to DVR them.

Evening slot

The evening period gives you a chance to root for Texas A&M to not fire their coach and present Tennessee with additional competition on the coaching carousel. Mike Leach is also in action.

Complete college football TV schedule for Week 13

And here’s the complete football schedule for the week, paginated and searchable!

I’ve seen a lot of amazing things in Neyland Stadium. One of them, I saw last night, at the most unlikely time.

The announced crowd in Neyland for the LSU game was over 96,000. There’s no way there were actually that many bodies in seats. I had four tickets and used only one. The season ticket holder to my left had two and was alone as well. It was one of those games where you could actually stretch out a little instead of feeling like you’re in a clown car with 102,455.

It’s no wonder. The forecast called for cold temperatures, high wind, rain, and little to no chance of a win. On the drive in, hosts of the official pre-game radio shows asked colleagues on at least two occasions what the Vols could do to win the game, and the answer was actual dead air. The co-hosts eventually came up with something to say in response to the questions, but it was obvious from the tone with which those answers were delivered that no one actually believed any of it would matter. Even the one former player I heard pick the Vols couldn’t come up with a game plan to make it happen.

The lack of hope on Rocky Top was at an all-time high, and for the privilege of watching a hopeless game, fans would have to sit in terrible weather all night long.

And yet, there was, in fact, still a huge crowd. Jimmy Hyams estimated that the actual attendance was more like 70,000, which sounds about right to me. They were into it, too, especially when the Vols’ defense forced two three-and-outs and held LSU to a field goal despite the first of two muffed punts giving them starting field position at the 15-yard line. And when Tennessee’s offense started actually moving the ball and tied the game with its own field goal in the wind, the crowd cheered even more.

They were not even deterred when the Vols muffed a punt the second time and gave LSU the ball inside the 20, or when the Tigers turned it into a touchdown this time. The defense was doing its part. The offense was showing life. The team went into the locker room at the half down only 17-10 despite essentially giving away 10 points.

And that was when the most amazing thing happened.

The temperature dropped. The rain and the wind increased. Much of the crowd headed for the shelter of the concourse. Those who remained in the stands had as much trouble catching the wind-swept sound waves from the Chris Blue halftime show as the punt returners had had catching punts.

And then BOOM!

Half of the lights in the stadium lost power. At the same time, the wind seemed to double in strength, and it was raging in every direction at once. Into this tempest, the heavens dumped abominable amounts of rain, which the angry wind caught and made fly, sending it sideways and skyward again for another round.

Pelted by the rain and the wind, the 25,000 or so people still in the stands began to rise to their feet one by one. The team hadn’t even come back onto the field yet, but the crowd began cheering in defiance of the elements. Bring it on! We’re still here.

Just moments later, the players began to emerge from the tunnel, and they didn’t just halfheartedly jog onto the field, either. No, they sprinted and skipped and jumped Into the half-lit maelstrom with their arms raised in the air in triumph. Is that all you got? We’re still here.

With even nature turned against them now, there they remained, a team and its fans, taking it on the chin together from every angle imaginable and somehow still upright, still smiling, still frustrating all attempts to rob them of their resolve.

It didn’t matter that they were teetering on the precipice of the worst season this proud program has ever seen.

It didn’t matter that all hope for the season had been lost weeks ago.

It did not matter that they’d given their all for no reward, over and over and over and over again.

They endured. Still there, still curling a finger to beckon The Opponent to come at them again because now they had seen it all and survived. They were still there.

At rock bottom, with half power, during a raging storm. In another game that they would eventually lose.

No matter.

The heart of Tennessee Football had been battered, beaten, bruised, and finally cast off the cliff into the abyss.

And there they discovered that despite it all, they were alive and well, even at the bottom of everything.

Go Vols.

The view from my seat at the beginning of the second half.

Hey, now! That’s the kind of free-spirited failure we can get behind!

Tennessee came out against LSU on Saturday night in Neyland Stadium with a different attitude, a different mindset and looked for a half like a much different football team.

Then, the storms came and washed away all those good vibes that began with the second half-opening kickoff lost in the blustering wind and buckets of rain. A three-and-out series that went backward and ended against the Vols’ own goal line, a flipped field and Tigers touchdown later, it was 23-10.

After all that — unfortunately for Tennessee’s spirited fans rejuvenated from Butch Jones’ firing last Sunday — it wasn’t a different team in orange. It was the same, ol’ Vols.

Butch is gone, but his legacy lives on!

They couldn’t pass the ball consistently, they couldn’t block anybody with the shadow of an offensive line, they couldn’t get key stops, they couldn’t go an entire series without a crippling penalty, and they couldn’t catch a kick.

For every big play like the Marquez Calloway drive to end the first half and the 60-yard Jeff George grab later, there were so many eye-covering blunders that kept the Vols from being a true threat at all in the second half. The stink of the Jones era eventually smothered the good vibes, manifesting itself with UT’s lack of halftime adjustments (for the, oh, 10th time in 10 games this season) and with Larry Scott’s miffed play calling.

Jarrett Guarantano may be the quarterback of the future in Knoxville, but he’s not the answer for the present. He may be nicknamed “The Guarantee,” but the only thing assured this year is that Tennessee is going to lose. You can pretty much set your watch by that, and it’s been a skeleton crew of Vols that’s hard to watch, just to be honest.

So many miscues and so few difference-makers led to loss No. 7 on the season. Thank God that Jones is gone, and this team looked better in the first half than it has in a long time, but Tennessee now can just beg 2017 to go away.

There will be no bowl game, just when we thought we’d moved past those days in this program. There are so many roster questions and holes that it’s hard to hold much optimism without a complete culture change. The only thing that matters is next week’s Pride Game, which means so much more than just beating Vanderbilt; the Vols will try to keep from being the only team in school history to lose eight regular-season games.

At this point, it may seem small; but it’s all that’s left.

The strength-and-conditioning failures from Jones’ tenure will be ghouls that haunt this program for at least a year and maybe more. As much as we hated and denied the anonymous NFL scout who told SEC Country’s Mike Griffith that this was a “soft” team before the season started, he could not have been more right. When you put those two factors together, you’ve got a team that gets hurt too much, injured far too much, and gets pushed around on the field no matter who’s in the lineup.

Believe it or not, the Tennessee D played well for much of the night against a plodding-but-efficient LSU offense. Nigel Warrior, Daniel Bituli and Co. were all over the field. They made plays they haven’t made for much of the season and played with a different level of excitement, happy perhaps to be shed of their head coach.

It was the closest thing to a Five-Star Heart performance that we’ve seen all year. And it was still nowhere near enough to finish anywhere near respectfully on the scoreboard. This team needs much more separation from this forgettable season than five days.

I found myself watching the clock Saturday night, just wanting the game to end. I’ll do the same next week wanting the season to follow suit. Just go away, let us be, let us try to do this thing over yet again. Because there isn’t anything left to play for.

So, we look toward the future. It’s hard to know what we’ll find there. What kind of identity will this team take under a new coach? How many of the recruits will be around to see that happen? Will mystery, MIA guys like Marcus Tatum, Jauan Jennings, Drew Richmond, Quinten Dormady and others be a part of the program? Can we actually see players get stronger, develop and improve? Is the quarterback of the future even on this year’s roster?

Unfortunately for Tennessee fans, we’re left with questions. But we can at least take solace that unanswered questions are always, unequivocally better than the wrong answer, and Jones is the wrong answer. We see that every game with this disjointed, undisciplined team that plays without any direction whatsoever. We don’t know what we’ve got on the roster because the offensive scheme is so poor and the gaps on defense are so great that it’s impossible to see what 2018 may hold.

All we know is it’s going to be different than this, and thank God for that. We have to take “different” because even though we don’t know if it’s going to be better, it’s simply hard for any of us to believe that it can be worse than what we saw Saturday night, what we’ve seen all year.

Yes, it was so much better against the Tigers than it has been. And it was still a 30-10 loss. Think about that, Vols fans. We can’t even be happy about moral victories anymore; we’re stuck with finding happiness in maybes. We’re forced to live in the past and the future because the present is rife with failure.

You wonder why there was so little talk about Tennessee-LSU this week in Knoxville. It’s because nobody wanted it to come, and, once it got here, even the excitement came and went like a firework, bright and sparkly before quickly disappearing. Like has been the case for much of the past 15 years, we have to take our joy in everything about the football program but the actual football.

So, leave us alone. Thank God that’s over, right? Now, let us get back to tracking planes and following leads for every Joe Fan the Source Man who knows Jon Gruden’s wife’s brother-in-law’s cousin’s mother. Let us stake out airports and wear out our F5 buttons and look for any glimmer of joy in the hope that something good is going to come our way; that something can change this infinite sadness; that different days are nigh.

Hope is what we do best. It’s all we have.

The Tennessee Volunteers host the LSU Tigers tonight in Neyland Stadium at 7:00 p.m. The game will be televised on ESPN. It’s not looking good for the Vols, but with interim head coach Brady Hoke shaking things up a bit, there’s a lot more of the unknown involved in this game, and that can cut either way.

I’ll be bundled up at the game, but for those of you who won’t be there, y’all can hang out in the comment section below and pull for the Vols together.

Go Vols.

• Kickoff: Nov. 18, 7 p.m. ET
• TV: ESPN
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Here’s the Week 12 college football TV schedule for Saturday.