You know it’s a special moment for University of Tennessee athletics when the traffic beaters are stirred enough by what is occurring to stay until it ends.
The outcome of Tennessee’s 45-28 TaxSlayer Bowl victory over Iowa on Jan. 2 had essentially been decided by the end of the first quarter, but about 40,000 UT fans stayed to celebrate every precious moment of the game and the party that followed it.
They stayed to celebrate the end of the frustration they had endured since 2008, and they stayed to celebrate the beginning of the success that UT’s thrashing of the Hawkeyes at EverBank Field foreshadowed.
And there is no mistaking the fact that success should be a part of this football program’s future.
The culture has changed.
Losses can happen, and they probably will next season. Anyone promising to their friends or proclaiming on message boards that the 2015 Vols will doubtlessly be a 10-win team still needs a few days to come down from the high which the bowl game provided.
But there is an obvious difference when the current Vols – the ones who slayed Iowa with a two-deep consisting almost entirely of returning players – are compared to their predecessors, and Butch Jones pointed it out in his postgame press conference.
“We’ve learned how to win,” Jones said. “Our players expect to win now every time they step on the football field. To me, a culture in anything that you do, that’s the starting process for anything.”
UT’s second-year coach is not one to offer plainly stated goals or marks of progress for his program.
In fact, since his introductory press conference more than two years ago, Jones has stuck to a strict script, which is to talk in circles using slogans that have come to nauseate those who cover him because of how consistently he relies upon them to gauge the progress of his program.
But his statement that the Vols have learned how to win should not be cast into the garbage can of cliché quotes that holds most of Jones’ other “brick-by-brick” and “process” riddled press conferences.
In fact, the declaration that his team has learned how to win only adds credence to his public relations strategy because now it appears to be true.
The Vols did not just beat Iowa, they steamrolled them, and nearly all the players responsible for that outcome are returning next season with a level of swagger and actual ability unmatched by any UT team in recent memory.
Actually, the culture has not changed at all.
There was no beating the traffic on the way back to Knoxville from Jacksonville, and there is no denying that the fans who made the trek, and the ones who did not, expect greater successes in the future.
The culture has returned. Tennessee is once again expected to be successful, and a 7-6 season won’t be something worth enduring the traffic to commemorate when 2015 turns to 2016.
And that is something worth celebrating.
David Cobb is a senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected].
