LARGETONY Blog

My beloved Tennessee Volunteers made their post season appearance in The Cotton Bowl yesterday against the Texas A&M Aggies. Tennessee was still dealing with some injuries and playing with a third-string quarterback and the Aggies basically had a home field advantage with the game being in Dallas. Most analysts picked A&M to win. The official line was A&M by five points, I believe.

So the general feeling was that it was going to be a close one, but A&M would pull off the win. Those of us in Tennessee felt like if we could win it if the coaches put together a strong game plan and the team stayed committed to it. It was shaping up to be a great game, filled with lots of drama and excitement.

Well, if you have seen the score, you know it didn’t quite turn out that way. Tennessee won. ..easily. The final score was 38-7. The Aggies didn’t even score until the last four minutes of the game. It was almost a shut out. It was one of the most boring games I have ever seen.

So what am I squabbling about? A win is a win right? Actually no. Don’t get me wrong. I am thrilled that we won and finshed the year with a respectable 10-3 record. But I also wanted the thrills, chills, and spills of a tough football game. I wanted the blood and guts situations Things like it’s 4th and short and your field position is almost smelling like scoring range. Do you go for the first down or field goal? Or forcing a fumble in the red zone after your opponent has executed a multi-play clock-eating drive. The kind of stuff that totally sways the momentem of the game back and forth. You can have those moments and still win. You can have those moments and if they fall at the right time and place, you can still win by a big margin.

What makes great football is when you have that game plan ready, you execute well, but things are happening or being thrown at you that you didn’t anticipate, so you make the necessary adjustments in that plan. It’s like you’re on a trip to Vegas and you run into some problems on the way, you may have to make some detours or use a diffent mode of transportation, but by God, you’re gonna get to Vegas!

There was very little of that on Saturday. We got to Vegas, but it was just too easy. The Aggies simply did not, as they say, “come ready to play football”. Not to diminish what the Vols did. They executed very very well. A&M just didn’t really challenge us in any way.

I really would have gotten a bigger kick out of the game if we hadn’t won by so much and had been an intense, hard-fought game. I might have even been okay with a loss if it was a passionate, heart-wrenching, roller coaster ride to the finish.

Wins are great, but nobody ever remembers or talks about the easy ones. I guess there is some truth to that old saying, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 at 10:33 pm and is filed under football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.