#61 Tennessee

Knoxville, TN

Neyland Stadium

October 29, 2022

Tennessee 44 - Kentucky 6 (ESPN Recap)

Rocky Top, you'll always be

Home sweet home to me

Good ol' Rocky Top

Rocky Top, Tennessee

Rocky Top, Tennessee

The annual business school trip with Evan and Stephen took me back to Tennessee for the second time this season and broke a streak of 6-straight non-Power 5 stadiums. The boys spent Thursday in Nashville before I flew in Friday and the three of us did two nights in Stephen’s RV Airstream on top of a parking garage. We did not deposit goal posts into the river.

Knoxville is much larger and more developed than the average college football town and more spread out than what I was expecting. There are multiple neighborhoods, new construction all over, and plenty of places to go: Market Square, Old City, and Cumberland to name a few.

Our Friday afternoon entailed getting some cornhole and beer pong gambling out of our system before heading to dinner at JC Holloways.

From there we bounced around Old City bars and even popped into Cool Beans for a half hour. It was Halloween weekend, and while the dedication to the holiday was nowhere close to that of Tallahassee a few years back, there were some good costumes and the goal posts from the Alabama game won 1st place in my mind.

GameDay was lovely! It was a perfect and picturesque fall afternoon with leaves changing/falling, a cool and dry 71 degrees throughout the afternoon. Also helped that it was a night game so we could sleep in and take our time getting to the festivities.

We hit the tailgating scene at 1pm for a 7pm kickoff by heading to the Vol Navy.

Arrived there a bit premature to it getting rowdy, but took a couple of photos and decided we would set up camp somewhere on solid ground. Twisted through campus and ended up in the mix of about 500 purchased tailgates that had great energy and vibes in Circle Park. We made friends, prospected with future Virginia popsicle truck customers, went undefeated on doubles cornhole spanning at least 25 games, and took over for managing a tailgate sponsored by The Hartford (which pretty much counts as the first time I received a payout from an insurance company). Met up with Blake and Joey before heading into the stadium with them. Those two Memphis boys are having a euphoric season as life-long Vols fans

who have gone…a long time since being relevant heading into November.

Spending 5 hours in Circle Park tailgates flew by like 30 minutes.

Pregame in Neyland was rowdy after the pre-game prayer (memories of BYU on that one)!

I went into this game a little bit nervous about how the game would go for the #3-ranked Vols given a bunch of factors: the trap situation between the Bama win and the Vols going to Georgia next week; playing the top defense in the SEC with a 1st round NFL QB and who was 19th ranked nationally; and the spread opening at Tenn -14 and being bet down to a closer of -10.5. My money was on Tennessee 1H -7 with small bets on 1H TTO 20 and Jalin Hyatt O74.5 yards receiving.

I should not have been nervous.

Tennessee is a really good and complete football team that swept my bets by halftime and nearly won by fiddy. Hendon Hooker is a win over Georgia from locking up the Heisman and Jalin Hyatt is the best WR in the country. Super interesting defensive strategy employed by Kentucky to let Hyatt run unguarded down field three times during the game. He only got 3 catches for 100 yards and 2 TDs on those plays…could have been worse. I bought a Hooker t-shirt for my collection and to support my Heisman ticket, but I didn’t go with the “Support your local Hooker” one which seemed to be the best seller. The game was a blowout, and it didn’t hurt that Tennessee could run up the middle for 2-4 yards at-will all game, which when that is rolling, makes them impossible to stop. Probably will have to be more creative in the Georgia game to move the sticks on 3rd and short. There was a blocked and missed XP in the game, a FG no good off the uprights, three high quality interceptions, and a great punt return. Hendon Hooker just looks ferociously in control of the offense and has the skill position weapons and D-Line to go all the way.

Leaving the stadium, Evan bought a bootleg bottle of water for $2 and handed the vendor a five-dollar bill. The vendor took the money, calculated the risk of the time it would take to make change versus get caught by police, and hit Evan with thrusting another bottle into his hands and said “two for five, two for five.” Evan, one of the smartest people alive, did realize the carney move that just victimized him, but let

him get away with it and we carried on to Liter Board for an hour before shutting it down early. Stephen also went down this public slide at one point which came up as I was showing videos of Jason and then played this one and said “this is Stephen from this weekend.”

In the Knoxville airport on Sunday, the 5-star, #4 recruit in college football was flying back to California. Nico Iamaleava is 18-years old, got paid $8m in NIL money, and I had not heard of him before Blake was star struck by him. We both took photos with him and I'm putting it in the blog in case he ends up being a superstar and not just a high school athlete.