Josh Dobbs and his teammates want to remember how they felt in the locker room moments after Tennessee’s crushing double-overtime loss to Oklahoma.
They hope that feeling is what motivates them for the remaining 10 regular season games.
“(We want) to remember this feeling because we never want to have it again,” Dobbs said. “And we won’t moving forward.
“It’s a game that we will learn from. We got a lot of valuable experience from it—offensively and defensively—moving forward, and we will be able to use this game as a stepping stone for the rest of the season.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a Tennessee football team used a devastating loss as a stepping-stone. Twenty years ago in 1995, with Peyton Manning as the starting quarterback, Tennessee surrendered a 16-point lead to Florida in The Swamp in the third game of the season and eventually lost 62-37. The Vols recovered to win their next nine games to finish No. 3 in the AP poll.
Two years later, Manning began his senior season with another loss to the Gators. He didn’t lose another regular-season game that season as the starting quarterback and helped Tennessee win the SEC championship.
The Vols lost to California 45-31 to open the 2007 season. The Vols finished that season 10-4 and became the last Tennessee team to win the SEC East.
Sophomore safety Todd Kelly Jr., who intercepted two passes in the Vols 31-24 loss to Oklahoma, grew up in Knoxville as a life-long vol fan, so he is familiar with Tennessee’s history of rebounding from early-season loses.
He used that history to galvanize his teammates and also observed that it isn’t really all that surprising to see a college football team recover from a bad, early-season loss.
“You see teams win national championships and lose their first one or two games,” Kelly said. “We are going in with the mindset that we can win any game on our schedule hopefully and we are going with (the mindset) that the next game is the next important game.
“I feel like if we do that we will be successful this season.”
The “the next game is the most important game” adage is just one of many proverbs Tennessee head coach Butch Jones has used in his tenure at Tennessee. But perhaps the most applicable Jones catchphrase at the moment is “snap and clear.”
The Vols probably won’t win the national championship this season. But the SEC East is wide open, and a good performance against Western Carolina (TV: ESPNU, 7 p.m.) would put the Vols in the right direction for SEC play.
But first, the Vols have to rebound from the Oklahoma loss.
To do that, redshirt senior safety Brian Randolph said that the Vols have to have the right perspective.
“You have to take it for what it’s worth, no crying over spilled milk,” Randolph said. “We still have all our dreams in front of us. We can still win the East, still win the SEC championship, still make it to the playoffs.
“It’s a tough loss, we all hurt about it. But we know we still have a lot to play for.”
