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Episode 9: Lamenting Tony V and Alabama · Champions of Life

welcome to the champions of life podcast where 3 orangeblooded Tennessee alums discuss how there's always next year Welcome back to the Champions of Life podcast, where there's always next year, and as you're thinking about next year, think about r and s logistics, warehousing, transportation, order fulfillment, 2 million square feet across East Tennessee and Savannah, Georgia.
We'd love to be able to help out any way we can.
We're just a couple balls fans trying to make things right, so.
Speaking of which, there's tears on the table as we speak.
Tony V he's left us.
Oh, okay.
Wait, Bobby, we gotta, we gotta let people know that Joe is not here today.
Oh, sorry.
I thought the tears on the table were, because Joe isn't here.
Uh, yes.
My, some of my two favorite men in my life are not here anymore, which is Joe.
Joe's not here.
And Tony v is not physically here, but Joe is, he's out today.
And you know.
We just didn't wanna let another couple days go by without getting some stuff out here on the podcast.
So apologies.
We needed to vent, right? Let's talk about it.
Okay, so Tony V first, the breaking news, which has been breaking like for the past two weeks.
Can we just say that it's been going on for a little bit now? There have been rumors and then they were squashed, and then they were resurrected, and then.
On the worst day for them to really be like, oh, this is happening.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Saturday, as we're getting our tails kicked by dumb crimson tide.
Well, we kicked our own tails, mostly the game.
We kicked our own tails.
We did.
That's true.
That's true.
Anyway, like super bad timing.
Obviously if you get that opportunity, you take it.
I understand.
I don't fault him for that.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know the money situation and the revenue sharing.
I know that probably went into it, but that was already an issue.
Right.
Sure.
That wasn't what pushed him to the Giants.
Um, will I get back into watching baseball and potentially watch some San Francisco Giants games? Sure.
I wanna see Tony go after an umpire and get tossed.
You know, he's gonna do that early on in the season next year.
Seeing him and Gilbert and who knows who else, you know.
He'll, it could be wild.
Yeah, it could.
It could be.
It could be, Tennessee out on the coast.
Hmm.
Still orange, kind of.
Okay.
Last thing I'll say is I do not want to see him tank out there in two years, and then he's looking for a job.
Nobody wants him in the majors.
Yeah.
Then he comes back to college.
Everybody wants him and he goes anywhere else, but especially another SEC team.
Mm-hmm.
That would be the worst.
Can we, whoever we have at that point, can we kick them to the curb and bring 'em back? Well, let's just go ahead and we're gonna budget that in.
That's gonna happen.
I think we should.
That's Tennessee at its finest.
We, that is exactly what's gonna happen.
He's gonna have a great couple years and he'll maybe fall off at some point.
He'll come back and destroy us for years to come.
That's unless we get 'em back, which, I don't know, maybe the baseball world looks like that.
I don't know.
I.
Admittedly, I did not follow baseball very much until Tony started getting No, that's fair.
Successful.
That's, that's fair.
But maybe people go back to the schools that they coached at.
I don't know.
He knows he would be welcome back with open arms.
Yes.
So if there's not some rift from the fan base from Well, that's what I was going to, Bobby.
Okay.
Talking about rumors, if there's not some riff between him and Danny White, Plowman, whatever.
Mm-hmm.
And you know, Barnes and Hoppel, they were like the three amigos.
Mm-hmm.
And so I don't know if they feel, surely not, they're gonna be behind him and supportive and like, Hey, you gotta take this.
No College CRUT has ever gone straight to MLB, you know, manager.
Yeah.
They get it.
I don't know.
Hopefully, maybe we won't have that.
Maybe he'll be really successful.
Maybe I would put my money on, I mean.
How much is coaching, how much of it is managing I, that's why they call 'em, I guess, managers in the pros, like you're managing lineups, you're managing egos.
That just blew my mind, Bobby.
That is so true.
You don't have to coach a ton if you're the guy you're managing.
Yes, he, I think he can do that.
I mean, I feel like he probably has a pretty big ego in a.
Way that's helpful as mm-hmm.
A coach.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yeah.
You look at some of these, like I look at Orgeron shifting gears, like he's probably not the world's best X's and OS kind of guy, but he's gonna get his team motivated.
Now, obviously, they had an amazing season because he had an all time great quarterback.
Mm-hmm.
And two of the best receivers in college.
Football at the same time, but he got the most outta that team.
Yep.
Um, so, you know, I think Tony's a good energy guy and he's charismatic, he's gonna build the culture the way he wants to.
I don't know if you can do that.
You know, he's 47.
There's not gonna be anybody necessarily older than him on that team, but like, he's not gonna be, managing coaching 19 and 20 year olds.
Andy's gonna come off the road, not have to recruit as much, free agency, maybe a little bit, I don't know, but doesn't have to deal with NIL junk and I mean, he's a lot of the headaches he doesn't have to deal with anymore.
I feel like that is part of the problem is this NIL thing, the athletic department having to budget that out.
Danny White made.
He tried to pull the curtain back a little bit yesterday and was trying to be transparent on where the money's going, to which department, which sport.
Um, it is.
It's just kind of a bummer that stuff that was once fun and it's still fun, but it's become more and more run like a business or a pro team and it just kind of zapped some of some of the fun out of it, I think.
All right.
Well, we love you, Tony.
You're always welcome.
See ya, Tony.
See ya.
All right.
Let's get to, Ugh, elevator.
Do I do just want, okay, please, Tony at the parade, famous Tony at the Oh Fame.
Famous last words.
You're either of all or you're not.
And he's not Bobby.
That's harsh.
He's got the only championship he set the rule in.
What the last, how long has it been since we've had 20, 30 years? 1998 and 2005, eight.
What is that? How many years? Don't ask.
No.
So I, he's still involved.
He's a VFL.
He's a VFL.
He has to be, he's royalty here.
Yeah.
But he did set the rules.
He set the ground rules there.
All right.
Okay.
Alabama, let's do it.
Yikes.
Ikes all of our fears.
So let's just recap what happened Monday, Monday morning.
You get here, I get in the door, we start rehashing everything instantly.
Mm-hmm.
10 minutes later should the podcast We should have turned.
Yes.
We should have been recording.
Then 10 minutes later, Joe walks in, we start re rehashing everything that we just real raw and uncut.
Ugh.
Okay.
Gimme your thoughts.
Nah, it was everything.
We were afraid it was gonna be, we pooped our pants there.
We just, the game plan wasn't there.
Offensive line, couldn't figure it out.
In the first 68% of the game, I would've gone 70, but 78% that's, yeah.
Drop passes.
Not just drop passes, but critical passes.
Mm-hmm.
Um, poor tackling, poor angles.
Ty Simpson was, he had a clean jersey.
Picked us apart.
Yes.
Yes.
It was everything as a balls fan that you feared it could be.
And you talked yourself into the game.
Tonight will be different.
Tonight we will, we'll come out, we'll be assertive.
We will dominate in our strengths, we'll expose their weaknesses.
We did none of that.
We did none of that.
I mean, the big one, obviously.
Oh, are you the pick six? Is this what the Pick six? Yes.
I mean, okay.
Okay.
Well I'll start there.
Were you done? I, I could go for a lot longer, but it's just, it's just not worth it.
Sorry, your pause made me question Dramatic pause.
Dramatic.
So prior to the pick six so when we didn't score on our first drive mm-hmm.
First time of the year, and I was like, well, she not great.
Not great.
This is not a good start.
It's not what we needed.
Nope.
Then they get it.
We nearly sack them, get a safety in the end zone.
Oh, wait a second.
He completes what it was third and like 15 or something like that? Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think 13 completes it.
They get a first down, we let him drive the entire field.
Okay.
So there's a 99 yard drive, whatever it was, and then yes, going into halftime you can salvage this killer and we kind of, it would've been a completely different first half if that pick six doesn't happen.
Or if poor little Deshaun Bishop was like.
Two inches taller.
Mm.
And had a little bit more of a reach.
He was so close, very close to getting that guy.
He gave it his all right.
He did.
He gave it his all for Tennessee.
Um, that was devastating.
The point swings were what were so killer.
Mm-hmm.
So you had that one.
Mm-hmm.
But then you had one a bit later when they get the safety on us.
Mm-hmm.
And then they get the ball back and do we hold 'em? No.
Do we hold 'em to a field goal? No.
We let 'em score a touchdown right down the field.
So those two point swings were absolutely.
They're killer.
Yeah.,
It's not impossible, but it's basically impossible to come back from those things to, to miss the safety.
Allow them to go down and score to get the safety on yourself, which i'm not sure what Joe was reading.
Uh, you know, going back and looking at it, obviously easy for me on my couch to look at it and say, Hey, there's two guys coming off a eight yard curl right in the middle of the field.
Maybe just dump it off to them and live to see another down.
Uh, he was maybe a little greedy looking downfield and it, it got us.
Um, now another, so that's, you know, we obviously, we forfeited seven points by throwing the pick.
They gained seven points by scoring on the pick.
That's 14.
Mm-hmm.
They come out, they drive down the field after the near safety.
That's 21.
Um, if you want to go ahead and indict the entire defense, minus Jonathan Josephs for Joshua.
Josephs.
Joshua Josephs.
Sorry, Joshua.
My apologies.
Jj, my guy.
My bad.
My bad.
Uh, he's the only one that tried to fall on a fumble.
And everyone's stood around and looked at it.
That's fair.
You pick it up.
It's a touchdown.
It's 28, 8 points.
That's fair.
I really liked Lander.
Great guy.
Maybe he, I don't know.
I, I haven't looked exactly at that play to see what he was doing and where he was.
Maybe he wasn't right there.
I feel like he wouldn't have made that mistake either.
we can give him credit for it.
I don't wanna indict that.
Aaron Carter.
Like, are we gonna indict the whole, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
We, they, Bobby, two thirds of the team watches the ball sit there.
I know.
And they smack it around and push it around.
It's like the whistle.
You learn that early on.
Fundamental of football.
You play to the whistle.
The whistle.
Nobody blew the whistle.
So now look, I'm not here to critique anybody.
I'm not a smart guy.
I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, but.
As we called two timeouts going into halftime.
One for ourselves because we ran the ball, which is great.
No arguments leading up to that.
It would've been in my Madden playing saturated brain throughout my high school career.
I would've called a timeout prior to that.
We waited and ran another play.
Instead of calling one of the two timeouts left you with 14 seconds.
Maybe you get an extra one or two plays outta that.
Okay.
It is what it is.
You call a timeout.
You have whatever it is, six seconds left.
They then call a timeout.
Mm-hmm.
You come back out in the same set I did.
Not everybody knew you were throwing exact.
I mean, I'm still at a loss with that.
Everybody knew you were throwing, so I get it.
You know.
The announcers, Roy, whatever his name is.
McElroy.
McElroy.
This guy, I don't, yeah, he's, he can't.
Why is he always touching his hands? Um, it's a nervous thing.
Why? Why do they have a former Alabama quarterback call? It's not fair.
I feel bad when Dame Bradshaw's doing our basketball games.
I feel bad for the other team.
I'm like, this isn't fair.
So Greg, he should not be on there.
No, not at all.
Um, although I was thankful when I turned on the Ole Miss game Georgia game, and I'm like, oh yes, herb Street, Reese Davis aren't gonna be on our call.
I'll take it.
Yeah, that's fair.
And then it starts up and it's McElroy and I was like, are you kidding me? What a joke feels intentional at this point.
Uh, but he makes a point the entire game.
He's like, Hey, Tennessee's offensive stretching the field when you get in the red zone.
You can't do that.
Everything's confined.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I get that.
But everybody in the world knew that we were not gonna run the ball.
And if you do run the ball, you better make sure you're, you're scoring.
I wish we would've ran the ball.
Obviously hindsight's 2020, but spread it out.
Call your best, play your short yardage, gain your money maker on third down, that's the, you know, some crossing routes, some curls.
Get Joey Mobile.
Make them have to guard the quarterback too.
Yes, it just was not a good end.
When I saw the formation, I said, please don't do this.
And then, you know, you see the press box and the sidelines and the coaches have their hands in their, their head on their hands, and it's like, yeah, I mean, this was the guy never once thought you were gonna run it.
No.
So the only other thing I'll say, I feel like we ranted a lot more Monday, but I guess time heals all wounds, right? Mm.
We're healing, but maybe I understand we're down in our secondary.
Mm-hmm.
We're down our two best players.
Got it.
But we have paid a lot of money for Boo Carter to get his head around.
Like, I have never played that position.
Obviously I'm not, I can't do it.
And I don't know all of the things that go into that.
And I know as you get better, and he's still very young, you're going to start getting better on your technique.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
But it's just killer.
He's not the only one either.
No.
Mm-hmm.
No, he's got a lot of money.
I called the whole team out.
You called one player out, so I feel like mine was better.
You called Jonathan Joseph's out, and he's not even a real player.
He's a real person.
Okay.
Okay.
Somewhere.
All right.
Anything else for the Alabama game before we move on? No.
I think, you know my hope here as a Tennessee fan, look, we're gonna, we're not gonna win every game, but the hope here would be that you can take some of this and learn from it.
Whether it's the younger guys, the guys that are gonna be here throughout.
The next season or two.
But really the coaching, you know, can we learn from this? Can we get better? Um, you just wanna see improvements.
You wanna see situational awareness.
You wanna see that we're fixing mistakes.
I love Coach Heel.
I think he's, I mean, if you could go back in time through the desert, where we were wandering.
I think if you told me and fast forward and said, you're gonna be here in this amount of time, you're gonna have all these accolades and these players hit these numbers and the win loss record's gonna be this, and you're gonna set program records and say, sign me up, I'm ready for it.
But whenever you do get those things, these losses feel worse because you know that they're there.
We just.
And then you get more critical of play calling of strategy.
Are we, hype's, halftime thing was, we will get 'em next time and it's like, hey, come on, let's get a little, we gotta get after guys a little bit here too.
Mm-hmm.
And I don't wanna critique 'em 'cause I don't know what I'm doing, but you just want, everybody wants to win and then you start analyzing things that you want to feel confident that your coaches and players well, that your coaches.
Are coaching to win and some of the things that we are doing, like getting away from our running game.
Mm-hmm.
That was clearly working.
What in the world? I don't get that, obviously, you know, going into the second or the first half.
But here's the thing, when you say you hope that we just make improvements, learn from these mistakes, I don't know that the coaching staff is, I don't.
I think that I have seen that over the course of this season.
It feels like more of the same.
That's why I said Monday, that I just feel like hypo hit his ceiling.
Hmm.
And that this is as good as it's gonna get.
We're not gonna get over the hump of just these kind of head scratching.
What's happening? Even clock management still.
Mm-hmm.
So, okay.
Man, we spent a long time Vincent.
Still, there's a lot to unpack on all that and I think the arms race is equal.
We've got great talent.
All of our competitors have great talent and so it really does come down to strategy and execution.
Your one missed, whatever it was, 39 yard field goal away from beating Georgia.
Yeah.
Um, but the takeaway there, like we talked about, you should keep your foot on the gas, we let off and it came back and bit us, Alabama, it's like we just didn't execute top to bottom, across the board.
And so, mm-hmm.
For me, I'm an amateur.
I'm watching the game on the couch.
I've seen 97% of Tennessee's plays this year, and whenever I watch us line up on third down.
Most of the time, and it's third and five or less, I know we're gonna run the ball and I know where it's going to be.
If I know that, then I know these guys making millions of dollars to beat us.
Know that too.
Right? And so I'm waiting for something to change to where we audible out of something or do something different, but we haven't.
And that's the concerning part, is like, can we, the good, the elite, they go and take it to the next level and they.
Get better.
I think what you're saying is this is it.
We don't know how to do that.
Yeah.
So no, I don't have confidence that we know how to do that.
Um, can we win out if we play like we played against Georgia, maybe.
Mm-hmm.
Um, although there were some things there that were very questionable that we would want to fix.
But even where we are now as a team, I don't think we're playing like we did then.
So this is getting long.
We need to move on.
But what time heals all wounds.
So does throwing to 17.
You talk about the run game, you talk about strategies.
It's like, why are we not giving this band more targets? Yeah.
He's, where's that gone throw to 17.
So you wanna win the rest of the season? Maybe just throw us some balls his way.
I don't know.
I just don't, I don't see us winning out.
I don't see us making the playoffs.
We'll drop another one.
Oklahoma has a extremely difficult schedule the rest of the year.
Um, Vandy is fairly difficult.
Mm-hmm.
Ours.
Yeah.
I mean, if we lose a Vandy, if, oh this, can I tell you the worst thing? Here's the worst thing.
I would love to use this.
Okay.
Are you ready for this, Bobby? No, actually we're good we're we win all our games.
We get to the end of the season playoffs on the line.
Vandy comes in, beats us at home.
They go to the playoffs over us.
That is the worst case scenario.
That's Tennessee football, Bobby.
That is the worst I'm calling it right now.
I and Tony v's.
On the Vandy sidelines.
He's coaching him up.
That is the worst.
Okay.
Sorry that I had to say that.
I had to put it out there.
I don't want that to happen.
I Okay.
In Tennessee's history and since 2022.
The golden year, the year that it should have been.
Right.
Right.
Michigan Boo u Michigan Boo U South Carolina's Toast Trash Field.
Yep.
That year since then, we have not lost a game at Neland Stadium, right.
Minus Georgia.
Georgia's the only one of those beat us right from there.
Tennessee has played, I think it's like 17 games at opposing SEC schools since 2022 through this year.
The vast we've won a lot of them.
The ones that are at night, we have won six out of the possible, I think it's 17 game.
We're like six and six and nine.
So that's 15 games.
Wow.
At night.
So again, SEC has a great schedule every year.
We being Tennessee, people love to see us crawling out of this desert place that we've been so they wanna see us get better or they love to hate us.
Mm-hmm.
And then you have a huge fan base, so we naturally are gonna get more of the night games.
Yep.
You go back to 2022, we get Death Valley at noon, we throttle 'em.
Mm-hmm.
That was a huge win for the program if you played that this LSU team today.
At 9:00 PM 8:00 PM I think we lose by three touchdowns.
Oh yeah.
Which hopefully is what they'll do to a and m on Saturday night.
But anyways, our road loss record is not great, especially at night.
And there needs to be something, I get it, it's hard to win in the SEC at a hostile environment where the fans are juiced up.
But you gotta pull some of these out.
We were lucky to win Mississippi State.
So anyways, what a ridiculous statement.
But you're not wrong.
Okay.
Quickly.
Kentucky game.
We got a throttle prediction.
We gotta absolutely trash 'em.
Absolutely.
We have to.
We have Crush the cats.
Yes.
Crush the cat.
They're bad.
Let's just say they are, but they're bad.
Took Texas to overtime in the world.
They did Texas also.
Texas also though is bad.
Yeah.
Okay.
Uh, they played somebody else close that they shouldn't have been close with.
We do everything better.
We have far superior talent.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
We are playing on hallowed ground, Kroger Field.
Alright.
It is for the paper plastic, right? Yes.
They didn't bring it back.
It's a SEC away game.
Yeah.
At night.
We never play them.
Great.
Okay.
So we are their Super Bowl.
Everybody likes to say that, but it's true.
It is true.
They would love to kill us.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So they'll be up and ready.
Admittedly, I have no idea if they're.
Do anything well, but they've got two wins on the season, so they've got those going for 'em.
Probably schools like Bowling Greena and Toledo, but that's okay.
Stoops clearly does not wanna be there.
They don't want 'em there.
Mm-hmm.
Can't afford it.
So you come out and you do exactly what you just said.
You run the ball, pound the ball.
Selective on your throws.
Maybe just two drives.
I would love to see two drives.
We're just gun slinging and the rest of the game you're just controlling the ball.
Yeah, one thing Kentucky does do well is they clock management.
They hold the ball and they have a greater time of possession.
So you gotta force turnovers.
You gotta limit ours.
You win the game.
Okay.
Score prediction.
I think we win by 10.
Win by 10.
Mm-hmm.
So the score being 31, 21, wow.
Specifics.
Okay.
No, that's where I was going.
I'm gonna say 27 17.
27 17.
Okay.
Max stretch that leg out.
I'll just go, I'll say 28, 21 Tennessee.
28 21.
Okay.
Close game.
I would love it if we're in the fifties.
That would be good.
Let's.
Let's crush 'em.
That would be good, which I would not be surprised to if we came out and just looked like an absolute machine and we'd beat 'em 51 to 28.
It would be nice, but I don't, I'm not putting my paycheck on that unless, Joe, you wanna gimme another one? All right, well this is the longest one yet.
Just two people, only two people.
So I don't, two people.
I don't know what that means, Bobby.
I don't think it's good.
Whatever it means.
Yeah, maybe we need to just record our, uh hallway conversations instead.
They'd be more entertaining for sure.
Definitely more entertaining.
All right.
That's it for Champions of Alive Podcast.
Catch us next time.