View from top of Neyland is good one, too
KNOXVILLE — Welcome to the upper level of the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium. Section BB. Row 4. Seats 9-12.
On StubHub.com, where you can buy and sell tickets, this view might be as desirable as toenail fungus. They’re certainly far from the worst spots in the cavernous 102,455-seat facility, but they aren’t likely to bring scalpers rewards unless Alabama or Florida is in the house and the Volunteers are undefeated.
But 41-year-old William Brown recently purchased Tennessee football season tickets for the first time in his life, and he got to see those seats up close and personal Friday morning through the school’s “Meet Your Seats” event. He had a different take of the situation.
“You can’t replace this, being in this stadium for a Tennessee football game,” Brown said. “There’s nothing like this atmosphere anywhere else in college football.”
Fans at Alabama, Florida, LSU, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma and last season’s national champion, Clemson, might argue that last point. That’s their right, and they have a fair amount of evidence to back it up.
But much like those longtime bastions of gridiron excellence, there is something unmistakably unique about autumn Saturdays in Neyland, despite the Vols failing to win the Southeastern Conference championship game since
been in the same spot the past five years.
“I’m a few rows above the tunnel where the players come out in the north end zone,” she said. “We face the big screen, which is great.”
It would be great for Team 121 to reward such fans with a championship season, or at least a run to the SEC title game.
A smile on her face and hope in her voice, Lane spoke of that possibility.
“Maybe this is the year,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of good coaching changes. I’m really impressed with what I’ve heard and read about the new strength and conditioning coach (Rock Gullickson). I think that’s one area we really needed to improve.”
(Said senior safety Todd Kelly Jr. to the media later that day: “We’re in the best shape of our lives.”)
Lane doesn’t count herself among the fans wishing fifthyear coach Butch Jones won’t see a sixth at Neyland.
“I think we need to win more,” she said. “But I love Butch.”
Still, there are times she wistfully returns to her freshman year, to that championship season.
“That’s what I thought life as a UT football fan was supposed to be like,” she recalled.
Brown had no such championship illusions when he first started going to games in the late 1980s.
Johnny Majors was the coach. A certain amount of uncertainty surfaced before most seasons. For proof, merely consider that in a five-year span beginning in 1985, Majors’ Vols went 9-1-2, 7-5, 10-2-1, 5-6, 11-1. Any Tennessee fan might gladly take such a run today, but back then, Johnny having marched home from a national championship at Pittsburgh, the Big Orange Nation wasn’t always happy with its native son.
And no matter how much he loved the Vols, Brown graduated from Tennessee Tech with an engineering degree. Yet when he moved back to Knoxville in 2003, something changed.
“It just became a huge part of my life,” he said of Vols football. “It’s just football to some people, but it’s a way of life around here. You only get to experience it seven times a year (in Neyland). I haven’t missed a home game in 11 years. My buddies and I gather almost every game day to watch the sun rise on Cumberland (Avenue) no matter what time the game starts. We used to meet six hours before the game, but now it’s like, ‘Who can get there first?’”
Despite forking over more than $2,000 for his season tickets, Brown is acting like a kid anticipating a visit from Santa Claus as he awaits their arrival.
“I’ve kept the tickets from every game I’ve ever gone to,” he said. “They’re like this high (places his hands 15 inches apart). But when these come in the mail and I can actually hold them, it will be like the best Christmas present ever.”
Like Lane, he hopes Christmas comes early for Jones and Team 121 as well.
“You can’t argue with anything he’s doing other than game day,” Brown said. “I think we’re definitely going in the right direction. We just need to win a few more games.”
Regardless, Brown’s 5-yearold daughter Cami, 2-year-old son Marshall and wife Holly will see the first of what he expects to be decades worth of games in Neyland’s section BB, row 4, seats 9-12 when the Vols host Indiana State on Sept. 9.
And the only reason Brown won’t be in Atlanta to watch them open against Georgia Tech?
“My daughter starts kindergarten the next day,” he said. “I love UT football, but I can’t miss that.”
Maybe the perspective from section BB, row 4, seats 9-12 is as good as it gets after all.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.