Pre-game

Daniel Proctor’s game day cartoon said it all:

Two UT players are in the front seat of a an old timey car with a Power T painted on the side and the words “Big Orange Bandwagon” painted on the side of a wooden truck bed. A tattered car flag is waving in the wind, the jalopy has no wheels, and the license plate reads “3-4 Vols.”

An exit sign overhead reads “South Bend exit,” and you can see the Golden Dome in the [distance]. One Volunteer is saying, “Hey, Coach! Is this our exit?” And then, turning around to see the empty truck bed, the tailgate swinging open, he says, “Coach?”

Proctor summed it up quite nicely. The wheels had come off, the offensive coordinator had been chucked, and the Tennessee Volunteers were clunking toward mystical Notre Dame and yet another top ten opponent.

Prior to the season, this match up was viewed as a top 10 power against a team in search of its identity. It was viewed the same way now, just with the roles reversed.

As Scout.com’s Jeffrey Stewart said:

These are two teams headed in opposite directions at the speed of light. The Fighting Irish are reborn under first year head coach Charlie Weis, the mastermind behind a potent offensive attack that is putting points on the scoreboard in bunches. With a 5-2 record that includes victories over Pittsburgh, Michigan, Washington, Purdue and Brigham Young, Notre Dame is best known for its instant classic cliffhanger last month against defending national champion and undefeated USC. That near victory propelled the Irish back into the top ten where they remain today at No. 9.

Conversely, Tennessee is in the depths of a spiraling free fall from a preseason ranking of No. 3 through a 3-4 start, until it was finally spit out of the bottom of national polls last week, following a 16-15 defeat to that other USC. The one with the roosters on its helmet and no national championships under its belt.

The Vols dramatic demise is the result of an offense that rarely has a pulse and produces points at the pace of the Tunisian national ice hockey team. If you say it’s not fair to compare Tennessee’s offense to a team that doesn’t exist. Well, I rest my case.

To make matters worse, the Uh-Oh stat loomed large. UT had shown a recent tendency to turn the ball over in the red zone while Notre Dame had developed a knack for taking it away in the red zone.

The game did, however, offer a classic match up of UT defensive coordinator John Chavis versus offensive mastermind Charlie Weis. Quality against quality. At least when Notre Dame had the ball.

With UT’s well-publicized offensive struggles, you’d have thought that this would be a trap game for the Irish. Unfortunately, Weis didn’t think so, and he had his team ready.

The game

NOTE: A larger version can be found on the Animated Drive Chart page.

Tennessee had more first downs and more net yards rushing, generally a formula for victory. The Irish, however, had Tom Zbikowski, Brady Quinn, and a corps of receivers who could actually catch the ball led by Jeff Samardzija.

Notre Dame had pass plays of 73, 43, and 35 yards to three different receivers. Their first drive consisted of passes of 4, 9, 9, 15, and 9 yards before the 43-yard pass to Anthony Fasano for a touchdown.

On the ensuing kickoff return, Lucas Taylor fumbled the ball and the Irish recovered at the UT 27. On third and 18, Quinn threw a 35-yard TD pass to Maurice Stovall.

See that five yard drive on Tennessee’s fifth possession? It ended with a punt to Zbikowski, who returned it 78 yards for yet another touchdown.

The Vols did get one touchdown drive before the half, but the game was feeling like a rout.

NOTE: A larger version can be found on the Animated Drive Chart page.

Tennessee did get a little momentum going in the second half, scoring a field goal and a touchdown on their second and third drives respectively. They had tied the game.

The 21-21 tie did not last long thanks to a short pass from Quinn to Samardzija, who took it 73 yards to the UT two yard line and scored a few plays later.

It was all down hill from there. On UT’s next drive, Ainge threw an interception to Ambrose Wooden. He was an absolute mess after that:

The Vols opened the drive deep in their own territory with a delay of game penalty. After a kickoff. On third and long, Ainge dropped back, and looked down field and found all receivers covered. The defensive end broke free of a block and wrapped his arms around Ainge. As Ainge was taken to the ground, he flipped a pass toward the scrimmage line.

The play was not only remniscent of the LSU Decision, but it was the second intentional grounding call against Ainge. Luckily, this time, it was not intercepted.

On the first play of the next series, with Tennessee down two touchdowns with under 4:00 minutes to play, Ainge again found no receivers open (maybe not his fault) and scrambled out of the pocket toward the sideline. But instead of running out of bounds to stop the clock, he slid down just in bounds. Like he was trying to do just that. The clock kept ticking.

On the very next play, Ainge threw an interception directly to [Zbikowski], who ran it in for a touchdown.

Post-game

And so the Tennessee Volunteers’ expectations had to be recalibrated yet again, this time to the nth degree:

[T]he Vols’ must now win out — not in order to get to the Rose Bowl, or to get to a BCS bowl, or to even get to the Citrus Bowl — but to get to any bowl.

It wasn’t all Ainge’s fault. Much of the blame rested with the receivers, including highly touted Robert Meachem, who barely missed a sure touchdown and didn’t even stretch out to catch the ball. Indeed, John Pennington observed that had the teams traded quarterbacks, it would not have mattered:

Let’s put Brady Quinn in Vol orange for a second. Would he turn this team around?

On Saturday, he got passes NEAR his receivers. They took it from there. A one-handed catch by Jeff Samardzija. A catch (barely out of bounds) by Samardzija where he jumped up and took a pass away from a Vol DB. A 5-yard reception that Samardzija took 73-yards to set up the go-ahead score. A juggling catch by a tight end. WR Maurice Stovall jumping out of his skin to bring down a finger-tip touchdown catch.

If Brady Quinn were a Vol… he would get NONE OF THAT. In this game he would have led the Vols to about the same number of points as they scored without him. His RECEIVERS made plays for him… and drove up his TD and yardage numbers even though, for most of the day, he just got the ball in their vicinity. He was far from laser-perfect.

I agreed, adding:

The fact that the receivers wore green jerseys in practice up until a couple of weeks ago seems to me to indicate that the coaches were more concerned about perfecting their ability than practicing their performance. What exactly were they practicing? Running fast? Running routes? Being tall and strong?

Were they practicing going up for a ball with aggressive defenders in their faces?

Or did the green jerseys tell the defenders to take it easy on them?

Torching the green jerseys may not have been too little, but it certainly was too late.

The Vols were now 3-5 and spiraling out of control. The team was in desperate need of the services of the season-long, now ironic sponsor of the local sports talk radio show, Joseph Construction Disaster Cleaning and Restoration.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 7:07 am and is filed under Independents, Notre Dame, Teams, Tennessee, Tennessee Volunteer Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.