Get ready to paint your hair orange and tattoo a “T” on your forehead. There’s going to be crazed excitement on Rocky Top in 2016.
The Vol football team started the new year off with a statement. While most of us were still yawning and stretching, the Vols were leaving Northwestern flatter than a bean and cheese tostada in the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Fla.
For anyone who may have turned off the game before the score was finalized, UT pounded a No. 12-ranked Northwestern team 45-6. That allowed the Vols to close the year on a six-game winning streak, their longest since 2003.
What all this means is it’s time to break out the ladder because the Vols are ready to climb to the next level of college football. There’s no reason UT shouldn’t be among the final four in next year’s college football playoffs.
Said QB Joshua Dobbs in an AP interview about next year’s team, “The sky’s the limit.”
This year’s 9-4 campaign may best be remembered as the one where players should have spent the offseason learning the Heimlich maneuver. The Vols couldn’t stop choking early in the year.
Tennessee was up at least two touchdowns in losses to Oklahoma, Florida and Arkansas, which produced a 2-3 start. The Vols then flashed a bit of resolve by erasing a 21-point deficit in a 38-31 victory over Georgia. UT followed that with a 19-14 setback at Alabama, another game the Vols led in the fourth quarter. It would prove to be the last loss of the season.
“There were a lot of individuals who wanted to bury us,” UT coach Butch Jones told the AP. “Actually, the adversity brought us closer and closer together.”
The Vols punctuated a dominant second half of the year with the most lopsided bowl victory in school history. UT only started five seniors in that wrecking ball of a game against Northwestern.
UT is scheduled to return Dobbs for his third season as starting QB and Jalen Hurd for his third season as starting RB. The defense is expected to include the highlight reel known as Derek Barnett, coming off back-to-back, 10-sack seasons.
Coincidentally, should the Vols make it all the way to the college football championship game, they will be making a return trip to Tampa.
“They can be back in Tampa again,” said offensive tackle Kyler Kerbyson, one of five seniors lost. “I believe in them 100 percent they can do it.”
This season may go down as Year of the If. What if the Vols hadn’t collapsed against Oklahoma? What if they’d finished off Florida?
I say next season is sure to enthrall. It will be Year of the Vol.