2018 Vols could learn much from 1998 Vols
Eleven days ago, the University of Tennessee welcoming back its 1998 national championship football team on the same night the 2018 Volunteers hosted Florida inside Neyland Stadium, one of the stars of those champs, Fred White, reflected on the chemistry still present with that squad.
“We still go on vacations together; we keep up through phone calls and social media,” he said. “We’re still family. Sometimes more family than our own families.”
It has been 20 years since they played together, laughed together, sweated together, dreamed together. No UT season has been close to as successful since then, and this year’s Big Orange model probably won’t come within seven victories of the 13 games that team won in 13 tries.
The inspiring thing for the current Vols or any other sports team determined to be great is why that team won it all, for the first UT football national championship since 1951 was supposed to have come a year earlier. You might remember the seniors on that 1997 team — Peyton Manning, Leonard Little, Marcus Nash, Terry Fair — all of them projected to have long and prosperous NFL careers.
So that 1998 squad was supposed to be at least something of a rebuilding job, ranked a pedestrian 10th in the preseason, seemingly headed to another Citrus Bowl. Only no one made that clear to White and Al Wilson and Tee Martin and Chad Clifton and Shaun Ellis and Deon Grant.
Not that the experts didn’t mention it. Often.
“We were a team that had no stars,” said Wilson, who starred for years in the NFL.
“Everybody told us we couldn’t get it done,” White added with a fair amount of disdain.
But White and his teammates knew better. They knew they were better players than most people believed. Moreover, and perhaps far more important, they knew they were better friends and closer teammates.
“We were a true brotherhood,” Grant said.
White said the seeds for that brotherhood were sowed on the first day of contact drills
that August through the most unlikely of bonding exercises — a fight.
“Shaun Ellis and Chad Clifton,” White said of that brief brawl. “Practice had never been that intense before. But it made us better. We might have fought on the field, but we were always brothers at the end of the day. I didn’t want to let those brothers down, and they didn’t want to let me down. That’s something I don’t always see with young guys today.”
It is that last thought that the current Vols need to memorize. Talent’s great and almost no one would argue that the 1997 Vols had far more star power than the ’98 team. But maybe they had too much. Maybe there was a perceived pecking order, starting with Manning.
The pecking order in 1998 was a straight line, though Wilson assuredly was first among equals. Especially in a historic overtime win over Florida and down the stretch against Arkansas, which UT trailed for most of the evening in Neyland Stadium before a blocked field goal by Grant and a late, late fumble by the Hogs propelled the Vols to victory and a spot in the first BCS title game.
“Calmest I’ve ever been,” Wilson said of the Florida game in which he forced three fumbles. “Actually fell asleep before the game. That had never happened before, and it never happened again.”
Of the final minutes against Arkansas, Grant recalled, “We were all tired. But right before that field goal, Al looked at me as if to say, ‘Give me all you got.’ It gave me energy. Al taught me how to be a leader.’”
Struggling though they may be at the moment, these current Vols have leaders. Trey Smith. Jauan Jennings. Daniel Bituli. Ryan Johnson. Darrin Kirkland Jr. Jarrett Guarantano. Todd Kelly Jr., if he can get healthy.
What they seem to lack is talent, or at least enough of it, probably, to reach a bowl game.
That said, Saturday’s loss at Georgia provided more hope than the losses to Florida and West Virginia. There were moments of solid play, enough of them to bring a tear to the eye of first-year coach Jeremy Pruitt, who hadn’t previously appeared to be a guy likely to exhibit such emotion in defeat.
“I like his mindset,” Clifton said of Pruitt. “He’s all about football. He’s 100 percent committed to getting Tennessee back to where it once was.”
As most of the past decade has shown, UT seemingly remains a long way from where it was through so much of the 1990s, when the Vols went 54-8 from 1995 through 1999.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t play with the same sense of unity and purpose as UT’s only national championship team since 1951 did 20 seasons ago.
“Football is a tough sport,” Wilson said. “It challenges you physically and mentally. But if you allow it to, it will teach you life lessons. We had great players, but what we really had was each other. We held each other accountable. We played for each other.”
If today’s Vols can become as 100 percent committed as their coach to getting Tennessee back to where it once was, they just might pave the way for Pruitt, at some point in the future, to compete for the school’s first national title since 1998.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.