UT Gameday Experience - NOT #1
10-6-04
By: Todd

On Thursday of last week, I picked up an Auburn Plainsman not to read the paper, but to look at the articles in the Sports Illustrated On Campus. I saw an article for the best weekend in college football. The first thing that struck me when I saw this was that Auburn was not in the top 10. Although this irked me, I couldn’t help but notice the ugly orange that was number 1. So, I decided to take a positive approach to this (for once). I have a chance to experience the “number 1 college football weekend experience.” I was excited to see crazy tailgaters, an intimidating scene on campus, capped off with an awesome pre-game and a great stadium atmosphere. Much to my displeasure, this is not what I found.

Saturday started off with going to ESPN’s College Gameday. I went up there and I was not very surprised to see a multitude of Auburn fans in the crowd. I quickly found out that I was well on my way to being annoyed by many things about the University of Tennessee. I knew that I would hate the song Rocky Top after the game, but I did not realize that I would be so ready to shoot someone for singing that song 10 hours before the game. The UT fans present did 3 cheers the whole time we were at Gameday. One cheer was, of course, “Rocky Top.” The other two were “Auburn Sucks!” (which took SO much originality) and “It’s great to be a tenn-e-see vol.” I mean, really, does this fit in that cheer? NO! Please, for the love, stop doing this! Think of some real cheers and maybe get some originality. The last cheer I heard was “V-O-L-S go vols go!.” Once again, this is a stolen cheer from the New York Jets. Everyone knows that the Jets made this cheer.

The tailgating at UT did not even begin to rival the Auburn tailgating experience. I mean, UT is in the middle of a rather large city. How can you say that this is the best gameday experience? More than half of the tailgaters I saw were Auburn tailgaters. And for the actual game, I was not at all impressed with Neyland Stadium. I have been to Sanford Stadium (UGA) and Ben Hill Griffen Stadium (The Swamp – University of Florida) and both of these stadiums just absolutely killed the atmosphere at Neyland. There was just no character to this stadium. I was highly disappointed because it was the worst possible 107,000 person stadium imaginable (I guess size doesn’t matter, huh?). Plus, their pre-game was WEAK. All they did was let the band play for about 7 minutes (and some of this was taken up by playing OUR fight song). I didn’t see them let the Davy Crockett dude ride around on a horse, they didn’t let smoky fly around the stadium, and none of the fans even knew their fight song. I guess I will give them a little credit, though. I was impressed that their players can run through that big T. That takes talent. It was probably the most talent their team displayed all night.

The most annoying thing about the gameday experience at UT was probably the fact that NO ONE knows their fight song. Do they have a fight song? I never heard of it. The only thing I heard was that AWFUL song “Rocky Top.” It wasn’t even written for them. It is an old country music song that they stole (of course) because they didn’t know their fight song. Their band played our fight song before the game, and I’m convinced that they had to do this because they did not know their own song. Right off the top of my head, I can think of 6 ORIGINAL cheers that Auburn does. This doesn’t count things like “it’s great to be an Auburn Tiger” or “Crazy Train”.

Wrapping up, the UT gameday experience was 5th in my rankings of gameday experiences. I would rank Auburn first (a little biased), Florida second, Georgia third, Alabama fourth, and UT fifth. I mean guys, YOU’RE BEHIND BAMA! Sports Illustrated should actually visit these colleges instead of just making assumptions on what they think is right.

Todd can be contacted at todd@theauburner.com