If you ask around town in Knoxville, you’ll hear the familiar collective anxiety of a fanbase that isn’t quite used to this success. It is easy to understand how the years of ineptitude have weighed on them. It is a program that has been kicked incessantly while it’s been down in the doldrums. But as Garth Brooks blared over the loudspeakers Saturday night while 100,000 people swung and swayed blaring out the lyrics to “Friends in Low Places,” their Tennessee team was certainly riding rather high indeed up 37–6 on Kentucky, en route to a 44–6 domination.
The measure of a championship contender is not just what it does in its biggest spots—like the demon-exorcizing win over Alabama a few weeks ago—it’s weeks like this. Consider that the Wildcats came into this game off of a bye week and coach Mark Stoops has built his own program for precisely this moment: to play spoiler in a big spot with a physical, grind-it-out run game. Tennessee was in a significant lookahead spot with the titanic matchup against Georgia looming large next weekend. From basically the first series, the Vols put to rest any doubt. Kentucky was unable to fulfill its role as spoiler, rendered moot by the fact that Tennessee played a suffocating level of defense it hadn’t yet this season, holding Kentucky to 2 of 13 on third down.
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