Vols destined to only be a top 20 team...

[BernardKingGOAT]

That may be one of the silliest posts ever on here and that’s saying something.

He's a know-nothing whiner

 

[Delmar]

On a neutral field my money would be on Indy & Smu. Both fared better than UT in the CFP, all 3 were 7-9 point road dogs vs similar opposition. That said, none of the 3 belonged there. Just as I suspect Boise and AZ ST won't belong.

Bad games happen. We ran into an angry, more talented team on their home field and lost and played very poorly. I don’t believe there is a team in the country that would have stayed with OSU Saturday night. I know what my eyes tell me and we are better than SMU and Indiana if we played like we did most of the season. If you want to base it on Saturday night, I’m not sure we could have beaten Slippery Rock.

Agree that Boise, ASU, SMU and Indiana probably aren’t among the 12 best but based on the rules the committee had to work with, those 12 teams made it and we were one of them. What 3 loss team would you have put in there to replace us?

 

[temptn]

or in a good year maybe top 10? Don't understand it but just not in the cards to be a consistent powerhouse year after year like georgia, alabama etcetera...

Top ten every year? I'm good with that.

 

[Delmar]

Listen, you tell me who deserves more money....a person that runs around and catches a football for a living, or someone who runs into a fire to rescue a person they have never met. Who works harder....a person who gets paid an obscene amount of money to work a 40-50 hour week, usually in pristine conditions, or the worker that works in a plant that is freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer to weld together the structural frame components for the vehicle you drive, or the lineman that works around the clock when the power lines are down in the freezing cold? Is it more important to decide whether to go for it on fourth and in inch, or to decide which procedure might save the life of someone who has a car wreck and brought into the emergency room you work in after you have already worked a 36 hour shift? The complete lack of perspective by people with no concept of what is actually important is what is wrong with this world right now. Until someone takes a stand, it will never get better. I am not jealous, because my life is fulfilled helping to ensure the welds those people work their tails off to provide keep sorry people from being killed when they forget how to drive. I will always wear orange, and will always call things the way I see them. A curse of being someone who is in their 60s and has little patience for idiocy.

Everyone knows those people you named deserve to be paid more. But it is impossible to compare those jobs to sports entertainment. Those big pay days are not going to change until those 100,000 people stop paying $200 a ticket 7 times a year at all these big schools and the millions stop watching it on TV and the massive TV contracts disappear. Don’t see that happening any time soon. Just the way it is. We either deal with it or find other interests.

 

[Dobbs 4 Heisman]

Not top 10. Sorry. We are Not as good as smu or Indiana. Scoreboard.... What Tennessee was this year was a fraud top 10. Remove the blinders.....

Penn State and Notre Dame aren't Ohio State. There's a reason the Buckeyes are favored this week against #1 Oregon. Vegas typically knows what they're doing. They kept us as 7.5 point dogs despite most of the money coming in on us to cover.

Ohio State is unfortunately the most talented team in the country and decided to wait until they played us to show everyone that.

 

[Doctrippin]

We were #7 in the last CFP poll. And #6 in both the AP and Coaches Poll. We're a top 10 program right now. What we ain't is a top 3 national title contender like Ohio State and Georgia. Those two teams outclassed us because they have more talent. We need to start recruiting at a top 5 level annually if we wanna compete with them. If we don't then we'll continue to be what we were this year. Good enough to make the playoffs but not good enough to actually compete with those that can win it all.

Sub par talent can be made up with great coaching and INNOVATIVE play calling. Look what Clark Lee did at Vandy. He was throwing old school wishbone at Bama and it totally worked. After the Hogs game their DC publicly stated we were easy to defend. That should have lit a fire under our OC but it didn't. OSU retooled their offense after the MI game and came out with what we saw. We went into the shoe with largely what we had had mediocre success with.

 

[Carl Pickens]

Not top 10. Sorry. We are Not as good as smu or Indiana. Scoreboard.... What Tennessee was this year was a fraud top 10. Remove the blinders.....

 

[will5]

Penn State and Notre Dame aren't Ohio State. There's a reason the Buckeyes are favored this week against #1 Oregon. Vegas typically knows what they're doing. They kept us as 7.5 point dogs despite most of the money coming in on us to cover.

Ohio State is unfortunately the most talented team in the country and decided to wait until they played us to show everyone that.

Ohio is leading because it's legal to sports bet from that state

 

[xpsyclonex2002]

This is true, and has a lot to do with not having the strength of a recruiting base to draw from. I don't think we can expect to recruit as well as Georgia and Texas. It's not happening. We are recruiting at a high enough level at the moment, however, to make the CFP .... and then anything can happen from there.

Even by the standards of this forum ..... the "whoa, is me" reactions to Saturday nights loss have been melodramatic and silly.

Do the people who are attacking Heupel as a recruiter even know that he was working with scholarship reductions and recruiting contact restrictions in 2022 and 2023 .... and didn't have a class of 2021 at all, because he wasn't hired until January 26, 2021?

There is some ignorance on display here. Heupel took the job when nobody else would. He has done better than what could have reasonably been expected 4 years ago. We looked dead in the water in December of 2020.

Volnation melodramatic and silly? color me shocked. Volnation has the emotional range of a 4 year old.

 

[xpsyclonex2002]

On a neutral field my money would be on Indy & Smu. Both fared better than UT in the CFP, all 3 were 7-9 point road dogs vs similar opposition. That said, none of the 3 belonged there. Just as I suspect Boise and AZ ST won't belong.

I don't think SMU or Boise or AZ ST would beat us on a neutral field. Indiana may give is a nail biter of a game but I think we would beat them by 7. The term Fraud is getting thrown out a lot. We weren't frauds but we are schizophrenic. We have the talent on the field to beat anyone but they just don't play well as a team. We've had an exceptionally tough defense that has kept our one dimensional offense in games long enough to make wins happen. Even our one dimensional offense has been about Sampson and that's about it. He gets hurt and the team falls apart.

 

[wmcovol]

or in a good year maybe top 10? Don't understand it but just not in the cards to be a consistent powerhouse year after year like georgia, alabama etcetera...

15 years of mediocrity isn’t erased with 3 good seasons despite how much we remember from “the good ole days”. OSU, Ga, Ala, etc have been playing for NCs annually while Tennessee was struggling to win 6 games.