Slaying the Dragon

The years since Tennessee football's national title have been a mixed bag at best. The Volunteers have won games but no bowls, picked up prized recruits but faced off-field distractions of the worst kind, charges of academic chicanery brought from within.

Winning a national title does nothing but raise expectations, even at places where the expectations are already high. So while the glow of Tennessee's charm-kissed 1998 perfection continued to fade, the search for something to replace it grew hotter and more frustrating. Finally, this past Saturday, new glory was found in the most unlikely of all places -- a place weighted with woe for the Big Orange, a place of many ghosts and demons, the dangerous, snaky place known as The Swamp, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, home of the Florida Gators.

To understand the Florida-Tennessee dynamic, one has to first get some background in the lore of southern college football, and then observe Vol-Gator games for several years. The past decade, which has essentially served as the birth of the rivalry, has been a mostly agonizing one for Tennessee, 1998 notwithstanding.

My first glimpse of Florida-Tennessee came before it all really mattered, in 1992 -- a rain-soaked affair from the days when the stands at mammoth Neyland Stadium towered over artificial turf and Heath Shuler wore orange number 21. Tennessee won, 31-17, without any hint of what was to come: one of the biggest and most heated rivalries in the sport.

Since then, it's been mostly Florida's ballgame. The Gators reeled off five straight mostly lopsided wins in the series between 1993 and 1997. Tennessee eeked out an overtime win in 1998, a victory that turned out to be a springboard for a national championship run. Then came 1999 and 2000: two should've-been Tennessee wins that morphed into Gator victories and made the Volunteers seem positively snakebit. The 2000 game was particularly cruel: dominated by Tennessee for fifty-nine of sixty minutes, won by Florida with a last-gasp controversial TD.

And so came this year's game. Normally early in the season, but postponed by September 11th and its aftermath, this year's Tennessee-Florida contest came around with Florida primed for a Rose Bowl bid. The collective weight of the Swamp's mystique, Tennessee's fragile psyche, Steve Spurrier's needling ("You can't spell Citrus Bowl without a U T," the Florida ballcoach once famously said, alluding to Tennessee's penchant to find itself in lower-tier bowls), those last two close wins, Florida quarterback Rex Grossman's Heisman hype and his team's momentum, plus the fact that no Tennessee team had won in Gainesville since 1971, seemed to add up to a Gator blowout. I wasn't the only one picking it: the line on the game was something like Florida minus 18, never mind that Tennessee was ranked fourth in the polls and sixth in the BCS and not mathematically eliminated from Rose Bowl consideration, at least not until the score of this one was final, according to the experts.

Tennessee, which had acquired a rep for underachieving in big games under Philip Fulmer -- again, 1998 notwithstanding -- had looked spooked by the Gators at many times in years past. But instead of playing tight, Tennessee atypically went on the attack at once, serving early notice that they had different intentions. With an aggressive approach and the running of undersized but tough running back Travis Stephens, the Volunteers bolted to a surprising 14-0 first quarter lead.

Ah, but Tennessee always folds in these games, and everyone knew it. Florida, predictably, counted with twenty unanswered points to take a 20-14 halftime lead, a turn of events that would have undone the Volunteers in years past. Tennessee committed two first-half turnovers that led directly to Gator scores -- errors that also would have crushed past efforts. And those two blown calls on Gator fumbles that somehow weren't? More points at which Tennessee might have folded in a previous year. Florida expected a collapse; the Florida-friendly crowd of more than 85,000 expected it; more than a few of the Tennessee backers who braved the Swamp and probably more of those who watched safely in their homes probably expected it as well. But it never happened.

Infused with a newfound steeliness, Tennessee, for this once in the series, came up big and never wavered, even in a close game, even on the road against their thorniest rival. Never panicking, not even in the face of turnovers, muffed calls, a hostile crowd, nor a late Gator rally, Tennessee simply bulldozed their bullies and flexing its collective muscle upfront on defense and offense.

Defensive end John Henderson and his cohorts led a tough pass rush that got in Grossman's face and took some of the heat off of suspect secondary. Grossman got his yards, as he usually will -- 362 of them altogether -- but only the face of a rush that left him shaken and stirred and usually very short on time.

Offensively, the Volunteer line detonated huge holes that the speedy and elusive Stephens, running seemingly with the burden of all that Gator dominance on his relatively small shoulders, running almost angrily, exploited for a near-record 226 rushing yards on just 19 carries, outgaining Florida's ground game almost eight yards to one by himself. Only Herschel Walker, twenty years ago, ever whipped a Florida defense with more impunity. Meanwhile, Casey Clausen will make no one who follows Tennessee forget Peyton Manning, but in his first ever start against the Gators, Clausen already has a better record against them than the beloved Manning ever will. Calm, apparently unruffled by his surroundings, Clausen was never flashy, only efficient -- 17 of 25 for 168 yards, a mere shadow of his counterpart -- but this time, efficiency under center was all Tennessee required.

But even with Stephens' heroics, Clausen's sometimes pugnacious solidity, and stout Volunteer defensive play, the Gators still held two bullets in the Fun 'N Gun until inside of two minutes left to play, much later than anyone in Tennessee would have preferred and presumably, based on the past, late enough to still erase all of the Volunteers' hard work. But a two-point conversion try that would've tied the game lanced harmlessly incomplete through the warm night and into the back wall of the end zone. An onside kick attempt, universally predicted but still dangerous, seemed to hang in the air for a long time, maybe as long as all those years of Gator dominance and Volunteer frustration, before finding a home in the sizable hands of Tennessee's John Finlayson. Finlayson, with four catches on the season, half of them this day, rarely touches the ball, but as he leapt and clasped on and refused to let go in the biggest play of his career, all of the air came out of the Gators and Florida was finally done. Fulmer was soaked; the Tennessee players were grinning. The scoreboard confirmed it, and you couldn't blame anyone for checking: at 0:00 -- Tennessee 34, Florida 32.

"Too often," I once wrote, "Tennessee seems merely to hope for victory, while Florida expects it." That was usually true. But things are finally looking up again for Tennessee -- they are, you might even say, looking Rosy.