I do think people growing up around east Tennessee take it for granted. Was in central Texas for a while, and though they talked about the Longhorns it wasn't nearly as big a part of their daily programming. It was mostly just rebroadcasts of this or that national sports shows. I was surprised by how sort of indifferent people were in the day to day conversations. But out there, high school football means more to most than Texas does, so it wasn't a complete shock.
No, the complete shock was LA. When I was out in Los Angeles, where I checked in for several years, they didn't say diddly squat about any of their college teams out there. Almost nothing. Not USC, not UCLA, not UC Irvine, not San Diego State, or even just general college sports. As with Texas, it was mostly rebroadcasts of national sports shows - or occasionally stuff focused on the Lakers, the Dodgers, etc. But never anything consistent. It was like they didn't exist. And gamedays, you'd get a short pregame radio broadcast, a brief postgame, and that was it for them. I couldn't comprehend it for a while. It just felt wrong. Still does, actually, but over time I came to understand just how little it mattered out there.
The 8-10 hours of daily dedicated UT talk shows we have in Knoxville on WNML, along with other radio stations and other shows (the weekly Sports Source shows on TV, etc.) is atypical and people would do well to treasure all of it. It is not the norm. Not at all.
