College football is the only sport capable of raising my heart rate these days. I gave up on the NFL when Joe Gibbs left the Redskins, and the last time I watched a complete baseball game Brady Anderson struck out in the bottom of the ninth, ending his and Cal Ripken Jr.’s careers. I haven’t cared about the NBA since the Bird and Magic days, and I’ll continue to not care about the NBA until the Bullets make their next championship run (somewhere in my parents’ house I have a banner from the last one).
But Saturdays in the fall are my high holy days. The obsession came fairly late to me — 1987, the year my sister moved to Clemson and the year I got to see Danny Ford’s Tigers play in Death Valley. Although my official justification for going to Florida State was its fine music school, I mainly went to watch big time college football up close and personal. I got to Tallahassee just in time to see their ACC debut, their first national championship, and way too many missed field goals. Which is why yesterday was such a good day.
Many people still put a small asterisk next to FSU’s first championship banner because, late in the season, we got beat pretty good up in South Bend. We only made it to the title game, in fact, because the Irish somehow managed to lose at Boston College the next week. Notre Dame beat us again last year — a season in which they played beyond their talent and we were mediocre, at best. Yesterday, finally, the tables turned. 37-0. Good times. Good times.
And then it got better. Virginia Tech horse-whipped Miami — beat them so badly, in fact, that by the end of the game the ‘Canes were picking fights and getting ejected from the game. Ah, the crooks and criminals who we had all come to hate during the mid-90s, finally revealing themselves once more.
And then there’s the Tennessee Volunteers, the least impressive two loss team in the country. A team that needed five overtimes to beat the horrible Crimson Tide last week. A team that needed a fourth quarter rally yesterday to beat Duke. Duke! The Vols are just horrible, and the funny thing is that they might just win the SEC East. John Adams has a great piece about them in today’s Knox New-Sentinel:
Moments later, linebacker Kevin Burnett used the same phrase, “We just have to keep playing Tennessee football.”
Tennessee football: What is it? It’s counting on the other guys to make more mistakes than you do. It’s relying on somebody else to take care of your business. And guess what? It’s working. . . .
UT’s offensive braintrust is more creative with excuses than plays. “We won without our starting tailback (Cedric Houston) and safety (Rashad Baker),” Fulmer pointed out. “Mark Jones (wide receiver/safety) was limited.” Wow! And it still beat Duke 23-6.
If the East championship came down to a vote, I can imagine an athletic director making a case for the Vols by saying: “Don’t forget, they beat Duke by 17 points without two starters. And Mark Jones was limited.” UT doesn’t want or need a vote. It just needs to muddle through against the three worst teams in the SEC – Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Kentucky – and for Auburn to beat Georgia in two weeks.
It just needs to keep playing Tennessee football.
We now return to regular Long Pauses programming . . .