LARGETONY Blog

Depending on who you are, sometimes it’s not a good thing to pull it out. But football is like doing it without a rubber in the backseat of a ‘69 Chevy with the preacher’s daughter. You always want to pull it out before it’s too late.

In the last minutes of yesterday’s game against LSU, Tennessee had the chance to stop the Tigers..er, Tigres…on 4th and 8, to hold on to a three point lead, take possession, run out the clock, and win. But the Vols just didn’t get it done. LSU did a great job of managing the ball and kept our defense on the field so long that they were just wiped. They had been deep in it so long that they just didn’t have the strength to pull it out. With nine secs left on the clock, LSU completed a long, long, long drive to score and jump ahead 28-24.

As great as Tennessee has been playing this year, I knew we would not get through the remainder of the season without a second loss. Yesterday the other shoe finally dropped.

It was really a classic game. Both teams played well in some ways and played poorly in others, with each ones strengths playing to the others weaknesses. Even with LSU’s offense really controlling the field most of the night, they were not as productive in scoring as we were. LSU held possession of the ball literally twice as long as we did, yet there was only a 4 point difference in the score. Looking at the time of possession stat, they should have had us by a larger margin.

So, the point I’m making is that even though we lost, I thought the Vols did a good job of overcoming the various hurdles they had (for example playing a Freshman quarterback in his first game because of injuries to our usual starter). They just ran out of gas and fell short.

So, Brett Cajun, being as big an LSU fan as I am a Vol fan, is sitting pretty right now, basking in the victory. And that’s cool. Because, as I told him, LSU deserves the win. I even said at the beginning of the season that LSU is probably the best team on our schedule this year. So, to lose by four is nothing to be ashamed of.

Brett had challenged me to a bet on the game: The fan of the losing team would have to write a post on his blog dogging his own team and praising the opposing team (and the genius of the winning fan for supporting such a glorious team). I didn’t take the bet, even though he tried to bait me by suggesting I didn’t have the “balls” to do it.

I didn’t take it for a couple of reasons. For one, win or lose, I can’t trash talk the Vols. So it’s better to pass on the bet rather than renig on it. Plus, I don’t like trash-talking other teams either. Even if we had won, I wouldn’t get much of a charge out of calling the Tigers big losers and saying they suck. I like having strong opponents. With a strong opponent you can hold your head high when you lose and you can feel a great sense of pride when you win. So, I’m not gonna put opponents down, either.

But I have to give kudos to Brett for not trashing the Vols in his post on the game. The only thing worse than a sore loser is an ugly winner. And Brett turned out to be as handsome a winner as he is a man (look at those eyes!).

So, Brett go forth and be the cock of the walk (although a smaller one )…until next season.

NOTE: I know that is not an American football in that picture. It’s either a rugby ball or and Australian football. But the picture represented the post well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.