There is something special about a home opener.
Two hundred and forty-nine days. That's how long it will have been since our season ended in Nashville on December 30th. Two hundred and forty-nine days of recruiting news, spring ball, message board arguments, and a schedule we've all had memorized since the day it came out. Two hundred and forty-nine days of waiting.
It ends Saturday at 3:30. Furman comes to Knoxville, and we go back to Neyland.
I cannot help but think about John Ward's opening monologue before the Florida game in 1990. Every Tennessee fan has a version of it living in their head. Here's mine:
“And as the crowd begins to roar and roar and roar to the deafening cheers of 95,000 fans, the Volunteers coming out of the gate in Orange and White, the crowd comes alive. The Volunteers are ready. It's time, ladies and gentlemen — it's football time in Tennessee!”
I have listened to that clip a hundred times. I still get chill bumps every single time.
That was the gift John Ward had. He never just called a football game. He handed you the feeling of standing inside one. Thirty-six years later, on a laptop speaker, in August, with no game on, it still works.
The tents go up before the sun does. Campus fills with people who haven't seen each other since November. The Vol Navy ties up on the river. Somebody's grandfather explains the checkerboards to a five-year-old for the first time. The Pride of the Southland forms the T, the Vols run through it, and 100,000 people lose their minds over something they have watched a hundred times before and will never get tired of.
Two hundred and forty-nine days is a long time to wait.
Let's enjoy every bit of it. Let's enjoy campus, and old friends, and all the pageantry of college football being back where it belongs. And let's have a hell of a season, Vols.
It's football time in Tennessee.