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.
