Tag: Sports

When I was in the fifth grade, I could name the starting lineups of the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins (favorite players? Al Bumbry and Charlie Brown). It was a great time to be a kid in Annapolis, Maryland. Both were world champions that year, and both remain my all-time favorite teams. I think every adult sports fan probably spends the rest of his or her life trying to recapture the joy and excitement of that first crush. The cliche works: being a fan is like an addiction, and each new fix pales in comparison to nostalgic memories.

To carry this silly analogy a bit further — and to indulge for a second in my other current obsession, The Wire — I gotta say that University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl has got the best “package” right now. The Vols are 24-2 (their best record ever), ranked #2 in the polls (highest ranking ever), and they’re playing a ridiculous brand of high-energy basketball — “controlled chaos,” Pearl calls it. And this Saturday, at 9 pm on ESPN, we’re playing the undefeated, top-ranked, and much-loathed Memphis Tigers in what will be, without question, the biggest game of hoops ever played in the Volunteer state.

For the first time in my life, I can name the top twelve players in a basketball team’s rotation. (And “rotation” is the right word here: Pearl substitutes players like line shifts in hockey. Eleven of the twelve average more than ten minutes per game.) When I learned yesterday afternoon that last night’s game with Auburn wasn’t televised, I walked across the street to the arena and bought one of the few remaining tickets. When I run into players on campus, I feel starstruck. When I read ESPN’s profile of Tyler Smith one day at work, I worried that someone might walk into my office to find me choking back tears. I’m so hooked.

Last year I came in dead last in the first annual Long Pauses March Madness Pick’Em. Counting the days . . .

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 . . .

As a Knoxville resident and UT employee/student, I’m required to make the following statement. (It’s actually a bylaw of the state constitution — listed right there under the mandatory regressive tax structure and last-in-the-nation per/pupil spending.)

It’s football time in Tennessee!

What can I say? A friend offered a free ticket, and I was more than willing to take him up on the offer. UT won easily, beating Fresno State 24-6 and proving once again that the Volunteers are the most boring football team in the country. I was at Florida State during the Charlie Ward, Warrick Dunn years, when it was not unusual to see my team outscore its opponent by six or seven touchdowns. I remember sitting in the stands at one game, rooting not for a victory over the then-lowly Maryland Terrapins — the victory was inevitable, after all — but rooting for 1,000 yards of total offense. As I recall, we fell only about 200 yards short that day.

You can call it running up the score, you can call it show-boating and unsportsmanlike, but here’s the thing: When, later in the season, FSU needed to put together a quick drive down the field — for instance in the Orange Bowl, when Nebraska took a 16-15 lead with two minutes left to play — that offense knew how to score because they had done it a lot that season. They were confident, they were sharp, and they won the national championship (finally).

I just don’t get the Fulmer/Sanders offense at UT. Against a clearly outmatched opponent, they put up only 24 points and seemed to spend the last three quarters waiting for the game to end. Fulmer’s apologists call it “classic, conservative, hard-nosed football.” I call it boring, counter-productive, and just a little bit embarrassing. The only reason, as far as I can tell, to put a Fresno State or a Marshall (next week) on your schedule is to give your offense an opportunity to learn how to score — to turn a game day into a practice session. Yesterday was another wasted opportunity.

Oh yeah, and UT’s defense was amazing. By my count, they allowed only one first down in the first three quarters, and it came on a circus-act catch from one of Fresno State’s receivers. Simon, Peace, and Burnett are about as impressive as a trio of linebackers will get this season.

The highlight of the game for me actually came up in the stands. Because my friend had gotten our tickets via his job in the athletic tutoring center, we were surrounded by other folks who were at the game compliments of the team, including several families of players. Sitting right in front of us was a proud father, mother, and sister, who floated above their seats for several seconds when their son/brother, a freshman, stepped onto the field for his first (and only, so far) play. Pretty cool. You’ve just got to love college football.