Where has loyalty gone when it comes to sports
Published 1:27 am Thursday, September 5, 2019
Well, well, well, it looks like once again all those who proclaimed their support and loyalty to a football program that has been through the ringer the last few years have once again shown they are ready to abandon ship like a bunch of rats on the sinking Titanic when the first game of a new season ended in an unexpected result to a team that by all means shouldn’t be able to play on the same level as the University of Tennessee.
I, likewise, was somewhat in shock by the results but in stepping back and taking a look at where this team was, where it is, and where it is headed can somehow understand why the result happened on Saturday.
First, there were high expectations coming into the season since Coach Jeremy Pruitt had a pretty strong recruiting year in the recent offseason and everyone thought that all the problems had been taken care of.
The truth of the matter is that Pruitt is going to have to cycle through the remaining one and two-star players that he inherited from brick mason Butch Jones who laid a brick when running the Vols football team in his tenure.
Pruitt has started to turn the tide as far as talent, but at minimal it still will be a couple of years before Tennessee is where everyone wants and thinks they should be.
I think that the problem as far as the fan base goes is the generation that we are in where everyone is looking for instant gratification and immediate results and patience is something of days gone by.
You see it everywhere you look. In the church, if the new pastor doesn’t do things the way we think it should be done he should be replaced. If the new job doesn’t meet our expectations–oh well see ya!
If the people working the cash register at the local KFC can’t speed it up, we will take our business somewhere else. I think you get the picture of where this is going.
It’s no different on the field of sports. I remember when the Atlanta Braves rode a wave of success and then when all their top name pitchers retired and the club started to offload some salaries, everyone who was a Braves fan began to bemoan what was going on.
It took a few years, but now the Braves are showing signs of heading back to the top but it took time, it took patience, and it took getting the young talent in place in their minor league clubs to start filtering into the Major League.
The same is going to have to happen with Tennessee. There comes a time where fans need to realize this and instead of criticizing everything coming and going and start screaming for a coaching change to find out what it means to be loyal and support the team in these lean times until Pruitt and his staff can bring the team back to the elite status it once recognized.
Have you counted how many coaching changes there have bee since Phil Fulmer was removed because the fans demanded a better coach?
Let’s see–Lane Kiffin, Derek Dooley, and Butch ‘Mortar’ Jones and Pruitt makes number four.
Does it not make logical sense it falls more on the skills of the players than on the coaches. Pruitt comes from programs that have won National Championships and has seen and experienced what it takes to be on that level.
However, Tennessee is NOT at that level yet. As I said earlier, it may take two to three more years for this to happen but it requires a lot of PATIENCE on the part of Big Orange Nation.
I am not a fan of a coach wanting to take the blame for players every time they mess up. It’s like giving a participation trophy to everybody that plays even though they lost every game.
These guys, for the most part, have played football since youth league and there is no coach around who should be blamed for two defensive ends lining up side by side on the line.
Logical sense tells me that if I am a defensive end and I look to my right or left and there is another defensive end beside me, one of us is out of place. That is not the coach’s fault–that’s mine or my teammates’ fault.
Its time that Pruitt puts the best 11 players on the field and quit worrying about hurting feelings. They either know how to play the game or they don’t.
And if they don’t like it, there is always the transfer portal. We will use the scholarships to get better players the following year.
Tennessee football will be back, but right now what these young men need is to not look up and see a glass half full as in Neyland Stadium, but a stadium filled with loyal fans who are saying we have your back now keep working to make us proud once again.
Where are all those true Vol fans? I will see you at Neyland Stadium Saturday when our team takes the field of battle against BYU!
