How Tennessee Football Got To This Point

As some of  you know, I broke up with the Tennessee Volunteers last year.  It was an abusive relationship.  The Vols were always promising me a ring, but then I'd wake up on Sunday morning feeling ashamed of myself.  But enough about that.  I've lived in Tennessee for 43 of my 49 years on this earth, so I have a little experience observing Volunteer fans, and the UT Football program.

First, a disclaimer:  I did not graduate from University of Tennessee.  I took a class there while I was in high school, then another in a summer program while I was home from Dayton.  Then I pursued my master's degree there, but dropped out before I finished.  But you can't live in Knoxville long without getting infected with the Big Orange Bug - that is, unless you've already been infected by some other program, like OSU or Florida.  So despite having grown up not giving a fig for UT football, within a couple years of my return to Knoxville, I was hooked.

I lived and died with the Vols (and with the Miami Dolphins, until Marino retired).  I remember laying on the floor in a hotel in Singapore during the '98 season, waiting to find out if the Big Orange won the SEC championship (hint... they did).  My heart was pounding while I waited for the CNN teasers to get around to announcing the result.  This, of course, was in the days before the ubiquity of the internet - so CNN had a purpose to international travelers.  I got in verbal altercations with my father-in-law, who had moved to Florida and adopted the Gators as his team.  When I moved back to Tennessee in '92, it was just in time for the Johnny Majors/Phil Fulmer drama.  In retrospect, there is a certain Knoxville charm to Johnny Majors - a Cherokee Country Club air about him that was never there with Fulmer.  That, of course, was part of Fulmer's downfall.

Because, of course, the Knoxville culture is a confused one.  We can't be as wholeheartedly redneck as Alabama, or as smugly midwest as Ohio State.  We can't be full-on country club like Vanderbilt, or as white-trash as Arkansas.  Knoxville's dichotomous nature is deeply ingrained - evidenced in the Yankee sympathizing of the majority of East-Tennessee in the civil war, the fierce paranoia of the Scottish highland Appalachian roots, and the industrial Irish-Catholic railroad expansion of Knoxville.  Knoxville can't be jazz - a complex music that people think is cool.  Knoxville can't be country - simple music that people think is ignorant.  Knoxville has to be bluegrass.  Complex music that nobody actually likes.  Knoxville isn't bourbon, and isn't even Tennessee Whiskey.  It's moonshine.

That dichotomy infuses the fans of the Tennessee Vols.  It is a mix of elitist (but progressive!) southern culture and full-on hillbilly "don't look funny at my cousin" feudin' country boys.  Walk around the UT campus and you're just as likely to see rebel flags as rainbow flags.  Snowflakes and red-faced, white shirted, blonde-haired business majors living side-by-side.

A word of warning.  That highlands paranoia that infuses Appalachia still lives strongly in Knoxville.  Go back to the 1986 Sugar Bowl when UT pummelled Vinny Testaverde's Miami Hurricanes, and ended the year ranked below them, or to 1997 when ESPN pushed Manning out of the Heisman Trophy, or CBS' "Rocky Flop" article... Tennessee fans feel persecuted.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying there's violence coming.   But for the national media to make a mockery of Tennessee right now is like Janet Reno giving Tim McVeigh his Waco.   Y'all don't know the people around here.  You best not piss them off.

But enough of a preamble.  Now I give you:  FIVE REASONS WHY TENNESSEE FOOTBALL SUCKS RIGHT NOW.

1.  MIKE HAMILTON

There should be Mike Hamilton urinal cakes in Neyland Stadium bathrooms.  A man, so loved and admired by the boosters, so well regarded by the Knoxville Media Personalities, who took over from Doug Dickey in 2002, inheriting a UT Football program that could beat anyone but Florida.  Remember those days?  Remember bitching about not being able to get past Florida?  Now you can't get past Vandy.  Mike Hamilton gave us Lane Kiffin and Derek Dooley.  Anyone who ever shook hands with Mike Hamilton should be banned from ever entering the UT campus.

2.  JOHN ADAMS

The master of "yellow sports journalism", John Adams has the amazing ability to be despised by everyone in Knoxville and yet still infect them with his vitriol.  Hordes of little John Adamses infest the UT campus.  Painting the rock with "Fire Butch Jones" and "Fire Derek Dooley" and "Don't Hire God."  John Adams, who supposedly sells papers, and who is the one reason I don't subscribe the Knoxville News Sentinel, whose holier-than-thou diatribes rain down on Knoxville and scorch everything in their path.  John Adams - the Josef Engels to Mike Hamilton's Karl Marx, or maybe it's the other way around.

3.  UT FANS (TYPE #2)

Who was that ass-hat on Fox Sports who said the UT Fan Base doesn't deserve a coach.  Because a few idiots ran around campus with signs opposing the Schiano hire?  Because some students lit fires when Kiffin's Midnight Ride rolled out of town?  Listen, moron.  Alabama fans are shooting Auburn fans and teabagging LSU fans and poisoning trees.  If the actions of the most moronic of the fans means you don't deserve a coach, then why in hell does Alabama have Nick Saban?  The vast majority of UT fans are pleasant, hospitable people who love their team, come out to see the Vols win or lose, and don't throw cups of urine on the opposing team (sorry Gators fans, it's true).  But... that being said... there are a sizable, and vocal contingent of Vols fans who will be satisfied with nothing less than a National Championship every year.  These are the useful idiots whom Mike Hamilton and John Adams mobilized to drive Fulmer out.  These are the idiots who were calling for Butch Jones to be fired in his first year.  These are the idiots who think there is some inherent reason why UT should have a top ranked football team, despite residing in a geographic region that doesn't produce top talent, despite residing in a media environment in which every player and coach will be subjected to ridicule, hatred, and death threats by that self-same fan base.  Listen, idiots.  Do you want to attract people to UT?  Or do you just want to be an asshole?  Because I think it's the latter.

4.  PARITY

There has been an astonishing rise in football talent in America.  Back in the day, an Alabama or a Tennessee could gobble up all the talented football players who also had the intelligence to survive at a minimal level in college.  Population growth, compared to the growth of the number of FBS schools, makes it obvious that the number of minimally qualified players with athletic ability increases in proportion to the number of slots on a football team.  This means that there is a stratification of the truly great players.  Alabama can fill its first, second, and third teams with 5-stars.  OSU, Clemson, and a few others can as well.  But for just about everybody else, you're not getting that different of a mix than Western Carolina.  Beyond the elite programs, there is a densification, and in that environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate yourself from the pack.  Now, if you're Miami, or OSU, or Georgia, you can "walk out your door" and find SEC 5-star talent.  But that's just not there in Knoxville, TN.  You have to be able to pull people to your school.  And even then, it's just not enough to make a difference, as we saw with Butch Jones.

5.  KNOXVILLE INTERNET AND RADIO MEDIA

There has never been as seething of a maggots' nest as in the Knoxville broadcast media - with the exception of the TV stations, whose gentle homerism is a welcome relief.  Obnoxious chodes such as Will West of WNML, ageing peckerheads like Micky Dearstone, and smug, self-congratulatory know-it-alls like Jimmy Hyams, fall over themselves to insult the fans (I know, I know, I just did the same) and to promote themselves, all while squirting their ichor over everything Tennessee.  They are the pied pipers of the horde of Type #2 UT Fans described above, goading and misinforming, proclaiming the demise of coaches from their marble thrones.

Well, I've got that off my chest.  Good thing no-one ever reads this blog.

Science!™

Well, here we are on Vladimir Lenin's Birthday... I mean Earth Day... I mean March for Science Day, and the usual cast of characters are out in the street protesting. This time it's the "assault on Science™" that has them in an uproar. Having never completed my master's degree, I don't consider myself to be a scientist, although I've contributed in a small way to science. And my contribution have only been tangential to the main issue at play, which is climate science. However, I have worked in science for twenty-five years, and have a little familiarity with the way it works. My company is also dependent on scientific funding, as our non-industrial customers depend on grants for their funding, so from a purely mercenary basis, I'm heavily in favor of expanding funding of the sciences. Further, while I'm not a climate-change swallower, I suspect that human activity is affecting the global climate. What I am not in favor of is a rabble of non-scientists laying claim to objective truth and declaring debate closed on an issue in which the politically fashionable conclusion has not been demonstrated with sufficient rigor. I know brilliant scientists who are absolutely convinced of manmade climate change. And I know brilliant scientists who are absolutely convinced that the evidence does not support that conclusion. There are a number of fundamental problems with manmade climate change theory, but the most basic one is that the scientific method itself, which requires not only hypothesis and data collection, but explanation, modeling, and demonstration of validity, has failed to confirm the manmade climate change theory. Again, this doesn't mean that it's not correct - but it means that it has not been demonstrated to be correct. Invoking the ghost of Galileo, I'd say that we're in a similar circumstance, for while Galileo's heliocentric theory was ultimately correct, it flew in the face of the evidence at the time, and failed to explain the actual observed data. So it was the folks who were opposed to Galileo who adhered more closely to rational science than the brilliant, intuitive Galileo himself. Along those same lines, it is amusing to hear the protesters chanting in favor of peer review. Which, of course, was a medieval system created by the Church to ensure orthodoxy. The climate change swallowers like to bemoan the political and industry funding of the deniers as evidence of their corruption. But the dependence of climate-change swallowers on almost entirely political funding, coupled with their slavish devotion to orthodoxy, is equally if not more corrupt. The important thing to remember about Science is that you have to be open to the idea that your theory is wrong. You have to be willing to accept conclusions that you don't like. And you have to question all of the data, methods, and theories with equal rigor. The desperation to close debate, the vicious smear campaigns against dissenters, and the avaricious desire for access to the public treasury are all behaviors that are better suited to a medieval court than a rational scientific system.