Tennessee's Orange and White Game Talking Points

Special weekend Talking Points. Woo and all.

• The players are quite excited about today's Orange and White Game:

  The teams practiced with each other Thursday and met afterward, with the Orange team concluding its talk with a rousing rendition of "White team (stinks)."

  Loud, good-natured ribbing ensued from both sides, and it reached a point where first-year coach Derek Dooley asked a student manager to blow the air horn and "tell them to get out of here before we have a riot."

  "I think they're excited. What do y'all think?" Dooley then said to reporters.

  The game, by the way, will be shown live on foxsportstennessee.com, and SportSouth will air a delayed version on Sunday at 8:00 p.m., Tuesday at 10:00 p.m., and Wednesday at 7:00 p.m.Yes, there will be a live thread, and it may or may not include a new picture of Jackson.
• There are a couple of great features this morning, one on speedy receiver Denarius Moore and one on brainy and persistent Marsalis Teague.
• Derek Dooley, on the banning of the wedge:

"I think every time somebody gets hurt there's this, 'Oh, my gosh, how can we prevent that from happening?' " Dooley said. "You're not going to prevent concussions because you hit each other in the head. You're not going to prevent shoulder injuries because you hit each other, and guys are big and fast and the force equals mass times acceleration. And we have a lot of mass and they're accelerating and it causes great force.

"The only way you're going to eliminate injury is to put the flags on and take the pads off. Then you'll have ACL (injuries), and then they'll say, 'We can't go full-speed because we don't want any ACLs.' It's a part of the game. You try to make it as safe as possible, but you also have to understand that it is a collision sport and a violent game."

There's a reason that guy's no longer a lawyer. Also, we've got a bit of a jump on the wedge thing, by the way, as Dooley doesn't use it anyway.