I lightheartedly said on our group therapy podcast after the Florida game that Tennessee had done the impossible, that they’d gone into a game for which the fans really had no expectations and still failed to live up to them. Against No. 3 Georgia Saturday night, the Vols once again did something almost unimaginable, although this time it was on the positive side of the ledger.
Tennessee was a 25.5-point underdog at home to the Georgia Bulldogs. In the end, they got beat by 29 points and failed to cover a monster spread. In a season that was supposed to serve as a turning point for the Jeremy Pruitt Era, they instead fell to 1-4 with another near-certain loss looming in two weeks.
And yet, despite all of that they made you think that maybe they weren’t quite as far away from that proverbial and elusive corner as you’d thought. They made you feel that maybe they were actually improving more rapidly than it had seemed. They made you believe that everything was going to be okay, and maybe sooner rather than later.
It wasn’t just the beginning
It wasn’t just the surprising start to the game, although that was certainly fun. Right after Georgia took its opening drive 84 yards in 12 plays to the end zone for a touchdown, Tennessee matched them with a 75-yard touchdown in two plays. And when the Bulldogs added three points on their next drive, the Vols one-upped them with a touchdown to take the lead, 14-10. The score was 14-13 until under two minutes to go in the first half.
But even when the wheels came off on the scoreboard, you never really felt like there weren’t good, valid, and fixable reasons for Georgia scoring all of the remaining points. The deeper and therefore stronger team leveraged that depth and strength for two touchdowns in the last two minutes of the first half. After that, they managed only a single field goal during a third-quarter penalty plague and then once again leveraged depth and strength for two more touchdowns in the fourth quarter, one of them a defensive score on a fumble and return resulting from a brutal sack that true freshman quarterback Brian Maurer never saw coming. What was indisputably a blowout on the scoreboard never felt like anything but a national championship contender doing what it should do against a rebuilding program.
The Vols had 20 first downs to Georgia’s 26. They were 5-12 on third downs while holding Georgia to 5-11. They had 273 passing yards to Georgia’s 288. Maurer not only had the extra juice the team needed, he hit key throws and kept one of the nation’s best defenses on its heels for most of the first half. Marquez Callaway and Jauan Jennings were big, both getting over 100 yards and touchdowns. The offensive line looked better, and the secondary made some beautiful plays. Everywhere you looked, the guys in orange were absolutely refusing to back down right until the final whistle.
What if there is no corner?
The record books will never identify this game as any kind of turning point for the Tennessee program. But maybe there is no corner, no clear delineation between then and now, today and tomorrow, bad and better and good and elite. Maybe it’s just one long winding road without any signs to let you know where you are until after you get there.
It would be nice if there was an actual metaphorical corner, someplace where you could in one motion turn out of the shadow and into the sun. But maybe it’s just one long continuum of gradients and the sunlight arrives first among the shadows.
I do know one thing for sure, though: Regardless of the data on the dashboard, last night our team put some distance between them and the past.
