My Blood Runs Orange

It's been a wild 24 hours for any Tennessee Volunteer fan. For those of you that do not live in Tennessee, within 300 miles of any SEC school, OR in the state of California (did I cover it all?), you may not have heard that Tennessee's head coach decided to leave for USC yesterday, presumably taking the top 10 recruiting class with him. This less than 14 months after he loudmouth-ed his way into Tennessee declaring that he didn't even like the color orange (I mean, seriously...we didn't see this coming?), raking in a few NCAA violations along the way. I actually did work today, but for some reason could not stay off of the UT sports websites and, mostly, Facebook, to see what the latest information was. After being on Facebook for about 3 minutes, I thought I might actually blog today using mostly direct quotes from my "friends." Some were so humorous they deserved more recognition. Some were rather scary...I would have felt like I was only fueling the fire, and some were so maddening that I changed my mind altogether. I was only moderately confused when I heard that they were actually burning things in the streets of Knoxville (a UT Snuggie people? I truly don't get the point of that).

The low point of my day today was not actually the sinking in of the news from last night (I never liked the guy, ask my husband), but people on facebook who actually got mad at those of us posting UT/Lane Kiffin news as our status updates instead of something about the people in Haiti. To give you an idea of how I feel about this, here is my status update from this morning "My 2 favorite quotes of the past 15 hours have been 'Can Bruce Pearl coach football' and 'Phillip Fulmer for UT AD!' Oh, and just so we're clear, I can be frustrated with UT athletics AND pray for people in Haiti at the same time. I'm a multi-tasker like that."

A lot of blog ideas came to mind today, but when I saw multiple people that seemed disappointed in those that were posting about UT football, I decided I needed to blog about one thing: the passion that is UT football. Although it's borderline embarrassing that people care enough to burn an orange Snuggie (honestly, such a waste!!), the only thing that fueled that fire, no pun intended, is the passion that people feel when we feel like we've been disappointed, or better, duped. Lane Kiffin duped all Tennessee fans into thinking he was exactly what we needed. Everyone fell for "I'm going to turn this program around" not because we're stupid, but because we wanted to believe that Tennessee football was going to be back on top. Everyone that is angry with Lane Kiffin today is angry mostly because he took away an excellent recruiting class. What makes people angry enough that they're burning Kiffin t-shirts and calendars and talking about throwing oranges at his house, is because he obviously didn't buy into the whole Tennessee spirit to begin with. He gave up important, time-honored traditions and Vol fans are entirely too passionate about Tennessee football to simply be okay with that. Take away the importance of the Game Maxims before a game and you're going to have some trouble. And, I repeat, he admitted he didn't like orange. Who was this guy?

Long story, short, I'm okay with Facebook and the nightly news being 90% about Lane Kiffin and UT. It means we're in the news again for something other than weapons and drug charges. It means UT has a better idea of what they don't want in a football coach. Most importantly, it proves our blood truly does runs orange, like we've always been claiming. All I know is, if I were in trouble and needed help or protection, you better believe I'd want a crazed and angry UT fan on my side.

And for the record, I'm still praying for people in Haiti.

GO VOLS