Spring practice is here, and the Tennessee fans’ optimism about the football team is inevitably budding like the flowers on a dogwood tree. Year after year, positivity abounds almost totally unencumbered by last year’s defeats and the overarching effects of a decade-long mismanagement of the football program.
Second-year head coach Jeremy Pruitt has no easy task in front of him. The rest of the SEC continues to stock its rosters with premier talent while Georgia, Florida and Alabama are still annual opponents, even if the order has changed a bit. Every year Tennessee remains at the bottom of the conference is another year’s worth of tarnish on the Tennessee brand and another year farther away from the glories and prominence of the past.