University of Tennessee Athletics
Hype, History No Concern For Vols
August 31, 2007 | Football
The Tennessee football players boarded the plane for Berkeley, Calif., Thursday with clear minds and great anticipation.
The anticipation was high for obvious reasons. After more than four weeks of grueling preseason practices, the Vols finally open the 2007 season Saturday in a primetime showdown with the California Golden Bears.
The players??? minds were clear because the objective is simple. With game plans installed and preparation complete, the goal is to minimize mistakes, make plays and of course, win the game.
What the Vols won???t be concerned with is all of the hype surrounding the game, or Tennessee???s less than stellar record on the West Coast.
The heaviest weight placed on Tennessee???s back is that of the entire Southeastern Conference.?? There are three games featuring SEC teams against BCS opponents on opening weekend, but only Tennessee faces a ranked team.
???Anytime we go out of conference, I feel like we take it on our shoulders to represent the SEC,??? junior linebacker Jerod Mayo said. ???We are going to go out there and play our brand of football, and I think we can be successful doing that.???
The hype only increases from here.
For much of the offseason, college football fans and pundits alike have debated endlessly questions like who is the best player, who is the best team, and which conference is the strongest?
What was the consensus on that strongest conference question? The SEC is first and the Pac-10 is second. As luck would have it, the Tennessee-Cal game is the only scheduled contest between schools from the two conferences this season. With no direct bowl tie-ins, this contest could be the only head-to-head game between the two conferences until Tennessee returns to the West Coast for the 2008 season opener at UCLA.
The Vols??? game with Cal, though more than three months removed from the Dec. 2 bowl selection show, could come up in the debate about who gets to play in a BCS bowl, even if Tennessee and Cal aren???t the teams under consideration.
In all, the SEC will play 13 regular season games against BCS opponents, and judging from preseason rankings, this weekend???s game sits behind only the LSU-Virginia Tech matchup when it comes to national title implications. Of course, anything can change by Nov. 24, when the final four of the 13 games are played.
???We are always thinking about representing the conference,??? quarterback Erik Ainge said. ???But once it is kicked off, that all goes away. We will go out there and represent Tennessee and the SEC, but our focus is on the game itself.???
Added to the hype is the fact that the game is college football???s feature presentation this weekend and airs live nationwide in primetime on ABC. A Vols team that is young and unproven at several positions will have to cut its teeth in front of a hostile crowd in Berkeley and millions more on television.
The word ???revenge??? has also been used over and over again. Cal has reportedly been seething for a full calendar year after its lopsided 2006 loss on Rocky Top.
???There is never a day in the offseason when we think ???we???re just playing so-and-so,?????? Ainge said. ???But it would be easy for us to fall into that lull if we opened with a lesser opponent. When you open with a team like California, every day you wake up in the summer, after ???what am I eating for breakfast???? it???s ???what is Cal doing today???????
On the field, Tennessee???s defense will have to contend with one of the Pac-10???s best quarterbacks in junior Nate Longshore, not to mention a group of veteran receivers including Heisman Trophy candidate DeSean Jackson. The Vols??? offense looks to establish the run against a Cal defense that lost three of its four starting defensive linemen from a year ago.
???We are going to approach this one like we would any other game,??? Mayo said. ???We know what kind of talent they have, and our coaches will have us prepared. Our focus is on what we can do, what we have prepared to do, not what they can do.???
In addition to the hype, Tennessee will be fighting history. The Vols are 14-10-3 all time against teams currently in the Pac-10, but only 2-6 when those games are played on the West Coast. Tennessee???s only other game in the Pacific time zone was a tie with Colorado in the 1990 Pigskin Classic.
It???s hard to put too much weight in those numbers because the games counted span more than 65 years back to 1939 when the Vols first played Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl. The Vols also have never played California in Berkeley. Tennessee hasn???t even been to the West Coast since 1997.??
The numbers get better under Philip Fulmer, too. He is 3-1 all-time against the Pac-10 and 1-1 out west.
???We???re not worried about any of that,??? Mayo said. ???This is a business trip, and this year???s business is totally separate from any other year???s business. We???re not going out there to sightsee. We will have a business attitude and try to get the job done.???
Tennessee chose to fly to the game a day early to ease travel concerns and give the players a full 48 hours to acclimate themselves before kickoff . The team holds a walk through this afternoon at Memorial Stadium, and the game is at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, which is not anything out of the ordinary for the Vols.
When kickoff does finally roll around, Tennessee will be mentally and physically ready for the game and season ahead. The Vols??? focus will be on the game and getting through the first of three tough contests to open their schedule. What won???t be a focus is what everyone else has decided the game means.
???We are trying to take the travel factor out of it by getting out there a day early,??? Ainge said. ???A lot of this is about not getting caught in all of the traps, all of the things that everyone is talking about. What we have to do is go out there and play like we are in our own backyard. There won???t be any worries beyond that.???
