Commence the 15-minute immediate post-game mostly incoherent and questionable-impression-filled ramblings.
I dared to take a peak out the back window, and let me just say, if you've never seen a mule banging his head against a 100-year-old red oak, well, you don't want to. It's like he's stuck in a scene from The Happening.
I can't make out all of his ramblings, so I'll just paraphrase:
Didn't you get the memo? Keep it simple! 1 (smack). 2 (thump!) 3 (thunck!) 4 (splat!)No. 1. Not one single solitary play even called for former All-American tight end Brandon Warren? THUNK!
No. 2. You know, it's nice and all that you got great back Montario Hardesty more carries than good back Arian Foster, but you must have misunderstood what I meant. I see what you did there. You put yourself into position to say that Hardesty had twice as many carries as Foster. Nice, but giving Hardesty six and Foster three was not what we had in mind. GRUNT SWACK!
No. 3. Two carries for Lennon Creer? Two? Seriously? For two yards? The team rushed for one. StinkING. NET. YARD! ALL!! GAME!!! [trickle, trickle, trickle.]
No. 4. [dazed, looking at the sky] Okay, better. Four receptions for 68 yards and a TD. It was evident that you were trying to get Gerald Jones involved. That reverse was unfortunately timed to coincide with a blitz from that side, and Jones dropped a key pass, too, but at least he was involved.
I stopped listening at that point because frankly I think Jackson lapsed into obscenitites only mules know. But he's mostly right. We threw twice as often as we tried to run despite the fact that Hardesty was averaging 3.3 yards per carry. At that rate, we should have been able to accumulate more than one yard all game, right? Somebody needs to figure out how to evaluate the flipping of the o-line to see if guys are more effective on one side or the other. Make that ineffective. This line can't be that much worse than they were last year. There has to be a reason.
Funny thing, though. The game sort of had an air of optimism to it, didn't it? We played hard. We connected on deep passes. We had a QB who was, mostly, leading the team in a positive direction.
If you, like me, felt that way after the game, then do yourself a favor and stop reading here.
Bye! See you next week, and Go Vols!
Still here? See, there's the small matter of the stats. Georgia out-gained us 458 yards to 209. They had nearly three times as many first downs. They had 149 times more rushing yardage than we did. (Math is fun!) And they basically let us play for one quarter of the game.
Is today's loss the tipping point of the Fulmer Era? I don't know. Stay tuned.