Team 117 in the long, illustrious history of the Tennessee Volunteers football program may not be the best it has ever fielded in terms of talent and high-level of play and execution, but it may well be its most special and perhaps the best coached. Thanks to Butch Jones, who enjoyed great success at both Central Michigan and Cincinnati by winning a combined four conference championships at both schools, the Vols look to return to the ranks of the nations elite and challenge such stalwart powerhouse programs within the SEC as Alabama, LSU, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Auburn, and Texas A&M for conference supremacy in what has become over the past ten years the most awesome collection of nationally-elite football teams in one major conference in the history of college football. The fact that the past seven BCS championships have been won by the SEC by four different schools (Alabama, Auburn, Florida, LSU), plus the very first national title of the BCS era being won by the great 1998 Vols under Phillip Fulmer as well as the 2003 LSU Tigers under current Alabama coach Nick Saban attest to this undeniable and fundamental truth. Consider the story of one player who struggled so mightily until this season: During the Derek Dooley era of mediocre teams by Tennessee standards (2010-2012), place kicker Michael Palardy was considered as perhaps the single biggest liability for the Vols aside from the teams paltry defense and running game; he was the teams worst individual player. It is now known that Dooley used to berate the guy, often walking up to him and crassly saying, Dont f**k this up! Unfortunately, this type of treatment did just that; Palardy missed more field goal attempts than he converted. Dooley went to great lengths to instill the fear of failure in the young man, and the result was, unfortunately, the opposite of the ends Dooley intended: Palardy failed numerous times due to this fear, and his confidence had been reduced to nil. What a difference he has been for this team in 2013, though, and Vol Nation has no one other than new head coach Butch Jones to thank for this effort. Palardy during an interview stated that Jones said to him the night prior to the epic South Carolina victory just weeks ago that he had a feeling that the game would come down to a field goal, and then Jones asked him if he could count on him to come through in the clutch. Palardy was stunned by this change in tone and rhetoric stemming from this new coach compared to Dooley; excited, he replied to him that yes, he could count on him to come through for him if his name is called. And he did just that with what may well have been the most famous game-winning field goal in the history of Tennessee football; the Vols won the programs biggest game in five seasons with its first victory over a nationally-ranked opponent since 2009 over #21 South Carolina, 31-13, because of his heroics. I said this last night on one of my nearly a dozen posts, and I will say it again here: I am not sure that I have ever been prouder of a team of young, rising superstars as well as the veterans of a program which just ten years ago was among the SEC and nations elite programs but has now sunken to the lowest depths in its history. Tennessee football has fallen upon hard times, but this team under Butch Jones and such outstanding young men as Palardy are like the Greek mythological bird known as the phoenix: it is a dead bird rising from the ashes within the funeral pyre in which it once burned. I have been following Tennessee football now for 24 years and have been privileged to have witnessed several truly elite teams produced by first Johnny Majors and later his successor Phillip Fulmer; never, though, have I seen a squad that was a better team than this one. These Vols play together better as a unit than did any other squad who at one time routinely finished in the nations top ten and competed for conference and national championships; this is why so many extraordinarily talented Tennessee teams who produced massive numbers of NFL talented players never reached their full potential, for there were always a series of agendas by these teams filled with multiple All-Americans as opposed to the one agenda that Butch Jones has fostered with this group of extraordinary young scholar-athletes: that of one team, one heartbeat, one soul. They lose and lose badly sometimes -- they did so last night against a very talented Missouri Tigers team -- but they never have nor will they ever give up so long as Butch Jones is coaching them. As Whitney Bowman is always so fond of teasing me for my loquaciousness (that has become her new favorite word because I am so cool that I used it a few times in sentences while conversing with her) as is evident by yet another miniature dissertation in the form of a Facebook status update, I want to give props to Butch Jones, but most of all, to his team of undermanned and very young Tennessee Volunteers. Never has there been a more special squad than Team 117. I, along with the millions of fans in Big Orange Country and other areas of the world aligning themselves with Vol Nation, salute Team 117s efforts! #GBO #VFL #BrickbyBrick #RisetotheTop #Team117 youtu.be/d8N_B8wWNzE
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 11:31:13 +0000
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