Big Orange Roundtable: Week 12

Big Orange Roundtable: Week 12

In last week’s roundtable, we all graded the performance against UAB, and as you can see from the roundup, it wasn’t pretty.  Actually, it looked more like the first-semester grades for a fraternity pledge at [insert your university here].  This week is my first time hosting, and after being dubbed “the Rookie” by last week’s host, YMSWWC, I will try not to make too many rookie mistakes.  That means I won’t attempt to be too creative and will stick to the fundamentals standard question format.  I don’t want to bore you with my introductory remarks, so I’ll get right down to business.

1.  The Vols made some costly on-field mistakes that would have kept them in the hunt, and while they might not have resulted in a win, they at least cost us a chance to win the game.  The two biggest mistakes, of course, were the fumble and interception by Crompton in the red zone.  Vent your anger and frustration here:

What in the world were we doing out there on Saturday?  That was pathetic!  I feel like I have been very long-suffering with Jonathan Crompton and like many, I haven’t (publicly) called for his head.  But how many mistakes is this kid going to make before he finally gets it together?  Those plays were equally if not more devastating than Foster’s fumble against UCLA, and they were drive-killers and downers for the Vols.  You have to protect the darn football, and you can’t make mistakes like that if you are going to win a game against a team that has the talent level and execution of Florida.  I was especially angry about the fumble because that is such a simple play.  Something is wrong when we have linemen stepping on our quarterback, plays like Foster running into and basically sacking our quarterback, and in this instance, a fullback and quarterback clipping each other.  That interception was also awful, and that ball should never have been thrown.  If you don’t have a good read, pick a guy in the crowd that has a Gators shirt on and pelt him with it.  But don’t cough up a chance to score in the first half.  Had we scored touchdowns on those drives, you are looking at a game that is 20-14 at halftime!  At the very worst, Lincoln (who never touched the field yesterday) puts six points on the board and we are looking at 20-6 with the Vols still in striking distance.

Other blunders of note which I will let the other bloggers rant about: Arian Foster’s personal foul that immediately preceded the aforementioned fumble, missed tackles on the Brandon James punt return, Demetrius Morley’s blown coverage that allowed a Florida touchdown (seriously, what the hell was he doing?), and predictable play-calling by Dave Clawson.

On a side-note, the defense (including D-Mo) played its butt off yesterday so kudos to them.  Eric Berry is a beast, and Rico McCoy needs to hand out bumper stickers that say “Honk if you got tackled by Rico!”  They were everywhere.  All I wanted from our defensive unit was for them to keep the score manageable, and aside from the punt return for a touchdown, they held Florida to 23 points.  That is more than respectable against a team as good as Florida.  Tebow didn’t even have 100 yards passing, and our front seven contained his rushing attack by holding him to a paltry 26 yards.  Florida only amassed 243 yards total offense (to our 258), and I really don’t know what more we could ask from them.  Coach Chavis had his boys ready, and it was the one bright spot on the day.  A lot of the devastating yards were gained on returns, and the blame for our special teams should be placed on the special teams coach.  Oh wait … we don’t have one.  Also, hurry back Colquitt … Cunningham isn’t very good.

2.  Speaking of special teams, Brandon James ended up punishing the Vols for fifty-two yards on a kick return and for ninety-two yards and a touchdown on his two punt returns.  What are your thoughts on the decision to kick to James?

These were killer moments, and I think punting to him was a bad decision.  I can forgive the decision to kick to him because the alternative is letting them start in great field position, although I really wouldn’t have cared if we had kicked the kickoff straight out of bounds.  We were completely aware what kind of threat James was, and all you would have to do is go watch the game film from last year (punt return touchdown) and the film from 2006 when a kick return for a touchdown got called back because of a Florida penalty.  Everyone was talking about James’ abilities all freaking week.  The general consensus seemed to be, “hell no, we don’t kick to him,” and I was in that boat.  James ended up deserving of the MVP for the game because he did most of the offense’s work for them on those drives.  His touchdown took the first quarter score from a manageable 10-0 to a “holy crap this could get ugly” 17-0.  He had more total yards than his quarterback.  And he got that during the first dadgum quarter.

My final thought for this question is one that I brought up here last week – can we please hire a special teams coach?  It has been one of our consistently bad areas over the years, and I don’t understand the rationale for not having one.  How many times do you have to take a kick to the chest before you realize you shouldn’t be walking behind a horse?  Other than our kickers through the years and our return men, it has been ridiculously sub-par.  Coaching the special teams by committee thing isn’t working, and once the rocket scientists that are running the Vols realize this, we will have one less problem.

3.  The boo birds were back on Saturday, and there was plenty to boo about.  There were quite a few throughout the game, but the loudest came when the team was booed when Tebow took the Gators into the Victory Formation.  What are your thoughts on fans booing our coaches/players on our home field?

I don’t really understand the point of booing.  It’s like calling your girlfriend a fatty when you want her to lose weight: you are probably just making things worse.  As for me, I didn’t boo yesterday, not once.  And I didn’t boo when our team got booed going into the locker room at the half at UAB.  But I promise you that I was as mad as anyone in that place at the end of that game. Booing my guys is just not something I do, and I think it’s pathetic that some fans do it.  I have heard the excuse, “I wasn’t booing the players, I was booing the coaches.”  To them I wanted to say, “give me a break, do you think anyone knows the difference?”  Crompton, Berry, and the rest of our boys don’t know the difference, and even worse, Josh Nunes and the rest of the bajillion football and basketball recruits that were at that game don’t know the difference.  We even had a recruit there whose name escapes me at the moment that we are worried about decommitting anyway.  Is this any message to send these kids? That you better win if you come here or we will turn on you and boo you in front of the whole country?

The one bright spot of booing is that it shows that the fans still care about this football team.  They still care about this program, and they take pride in the university.  I love that the passion is still there, but I hope they realize that there are more constructive ways to bring about change or express your displeasure than to boo our players in front of our rivals.

4.  In addition to the boo birds, there is another thing that is very aggravating to me about some Vols’ fans and really sports fans in general.  There were people leaving the stadium so fast that you would have thought real live gators had been let loose into the stands.  Explain why you are or are not a leaver?

In the movie The Shootist, John Wayne’s character J.B. Books outlines his philosophy on life when he makes the statement, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do those things to other people and I require the same of them.”  In addition to being one of my all-time favorite movie lines, I love the fact that it is so black and white.  I have a black and white philosophy in this area: I won’t leave, no matter how bad we are losing or how big we are winning.  There are certainly exceptions for personal emergencies or if the President were to call on me for a special mission, but it is a principle by which I live my life as a fan.  I have never left a Tennessee game early, and I don’t ever intend to do so.

I think people that leave because we are losing are cowards, and I have even made remarks to that effect to them as they walk past me on their way out.  It angers me to no end, and I wouldn’t care if some of those people were never allowed back into the stadium.  These are the kind of people who are the first ones to bail if things aren’t going their way, and are probably lifelong quitters in general anyway.  I think that if you are going to sit there during the great moments, you need to sit there for the painful ones.  If you can’t handle losing and getting beat, then stay home and don’t waste your time coming.  I stay for all of it – I stood there yesterday when the Fightin’ Gator Band serenaded their players and fans with renditions of the Tennessee Waltz and Rocky Top after the game.  I also stood there in 2002 as Bama fans repeatedly sang that stupid Rammer Jammer song that they love so much after they beat the snot out of us.  I want to remember what losing tastes like, and I want to remember it.  It is part of the fan experience, and while I don’t enjoy it, I think it builds your character as a fan.  Remember it.  Soak it up.  There will come a day in the future when we can beat Florida again, and I am going to deserve it and enjoy it so much more than those cowards.  And when a hero leads the band in Rocky Top or plants a Power T flag on the fifty yard line after that win, I am going to smirk a little bit in remembrance at the Gator version of the Waltz and think, “Yeah, it was our turn to get you this time suckers!”

5. I am going to call this question the “Quarterbacks and Coaches” question.  All I want to know is, where the heck do we go now with our current quarterbacks and coaches?

Quarterbacks: I have wrestled with this question since the start of the season.  On the one hand, I think Crompton could be a good quarterback, but on the other, he hasn’t shown me anything that assures me that he is ready to compete on this level.  At the very least, he makes bad decisions.  These decisions result in interceptions and dropped balls by Luke Stocker that should have been thrown to Brandon Warren.  I seriously don’t understand Crompton’s man-love with Stocker.  You have to use your strengths, and I don’t think Stocker is a strength.  Stocker is okay, but Brandon freaking WARREN was one of the best athletes in that whole stadium on Saturday.  Two catches for twelve yards by Warren is frustrating because that means we are letting great talent go to waste.  At quarterback, I think we ride with Crompton at least through the Georgia game.  Maybe we will find out that there was a quarterback in there after all and that he was just having a hard time for whatever reason.  If not, we will know for sure that he is not the answer, and we spend our time focusing on Stephens and/or Coleman and praying for the Nunes era to come quickly.

Coaches: Ever heard a variation of the expression “two monkeys trying to hump a doorknob/football?”  Well, that’s what our coaching decisions look like right now.  Our offensive playcalling was predictable, leaving me to wonder yet again if Dave Clawson is ready to coach in the premier football conference in the country.  It’s disturbing, but he things that really concern me most are the things that happen off the field.  What are we doing during the week and when we aren’t playing?  Are we even having practice?  There are some plays where our guys look like that is the first time they have ever run that particular play.  Small mistakes here and there are the result of poor coaching in practice, and there is especially no excuse for penalties.  Nine penalties for ninety-five yards isn’t going to get you anywhere.  Let’s look at this in relation to total yards by Florida:

Penalty yards:     92
Return yards:     148
Florida offense: 243
TOTAL YARDS:   483

It’s a wonder Florida only had thirty points after looking at that.

In the movie Four Brothers, the villain gets angry at his henchmen for screwing up a task and wants to know, “Who’s got to get in the ring with me on this?!?!”  Well, whether it be Mike Hamilton or Phil Fulmer or other coaches/players, somebody needs to get in the ring with the entire Tennessee Vols communityon this and produce some answers for what is going down with our program.  I am not quite ready to call for any firings like my partner in crime Ghost, but I will tell you straight up that I wouldn’t be upset if our head coach turned in his resignation.  I want more from Fulmer than a scowl on the Phil Fulmer show and a “This loss is on me.”  Damn right it is.  Enough is enough.

After the game, Chavis said in President Bush-like fashion that we need to “stay the course.”  Frankly, I think if we do that, it’s going to get way worse before it gets better.  If we continue to steer this boat in the direction we are heading (that roar you hear is a waterfall), UT is going to have a hard time filling up Bearden High school’s stadium with game day fans, much less the gargantuan Neyland.  The old saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” ought to be “if it’s obviously broken, get to work fixing it.”  We can’t keep doing the same thing that we have been doing and expect anything to be different, and I know Fulmer had to pick up some basic logic in Franklin County.  Say what you will about the town or the high school, but at least people over there have some common sense.

I am looking forward to the day when we decide we are going to join the rest of the elite SEC programs and start playing football like a Big Orange team is supposed to.  BDLC and I had an interesting conversation earlier, and I have been thinking all afternoon, “Wonder how much it would take to get Bob Stoops to return to the SEC?”  Unfortunately, the answer to that question is “too much” seeing as how he is the highest paid coach in the land.  I don’t really care what we do at this point, but somebody needs to start doing something.

6.  In closing, how do you see this weekend’s game against Auburn unfolding?

It will be a battle of lackluster offenses.  Even if Auburn finds its offense this week (which I am sure they will), I think our defense will keep us in the game.  Our offense will probably sputter against Auburn’s stout D, but if our defense can manage a few big plays, we could take it down to the end. If our offense is only slightly below average (an improvement from the AWFUL performances we have seen to date), I think we could win the game.  However, do not put your money on Tennessee unless the fairy godmother comes in and gives us a new coach and a new quarterback.  I don’t want to be responsible for the loss of your life savings and your impending divorce from your wife for being such a moron.

Like a good Tennessee fan, I will be making the trek down for the game, and I fully intend on enjoying my time in Auburn if nothing else.  Though there are a few bad apples, it is an incredible place, a beautiful campus teeming with girls that are the same.  The atmosphere is incredible, the stadium is top notch, and Barners are generally good folks.

Hopefully my first foray into leading the Roundtable was a pleasant one.  Like any rookie, there are probably a few mistakes, but it was fun coming up with the questions.  Check out my comrades for their answers as I link them below, and check back for the roundup at the end of the week!

• YMSWWC
• Loser with Socks
• 3rd Saturday in Blogtober
• Fulmer’s Belly
• Gate 21
• Rocky Top Talk
• SouthEastern Sports Blog
• Moondog Sports