Alabama Football: What Vols defense did against Ole Miss merits notice

There are many reasons to expect Alabama Football to have a three-plus touchdown victory over Tennessee Saturday night. The Alabama Crimson Tide is the better team with more talent and better coaching. Lit cigars in the third quarter should be the correct timing.

There is an undercurrent to the game and it tells another story. Not the Vols’ fans are classless story, or that the program is the ‘trashiest’ in the SEC. Vols-hating, Alabama football fans love those stories. As one of those Vols’ haters, I must confess I have been ignoring another, more important storyline.

More importantly, Josh Heupel has made the Vols decidedly better, and he has done it quickly. The reasons for my Vols-blindness go way back, but recent years have added to it. I have a strong aversion to anything related to UCF. It goes back to now Tennessee AD, then UCF AD, Danny White claiming a National Championship in 2017. We can skip the details of the brazen and bogus claim and just offer a reminder. Claimed National Championships ended after the 1997 season. There was a split Championship once since, in 2003 when the BCS winner was not chosen by the AP Poll.

But as someone said, tell any lie enough times and some will start to believe it. Media outlets in central Florida ‘reported’ the NCAA subsequently ‘recognized’ UCF as a 2017 National Champion. Look here at the NCAA list of National Champions. Other than by, the result of some bizarre hallucination, UCF cannot be seen anywhere on the list.

Anyway, with entrenched hate for UT and ‘cream on top’ disdain for UCF, I have been unfair to Josh Heupel. Tennessee is much better under Heupel. That was clear from Saturday night’s game. Ole Miss won the game for two main reasons. One was the first-quarter punt return fumble by UT’s Velus Jones Jr. The Rebels recovered the fumble at the Tennessee 11-yard line and scored a short-field touchdown a few plays later.

The other main reason Ole Miss won was the rushing yards of Matt Corral. Corral had 30 rushes against UT and he gained 195 yards on them for a 6.5 yards per rush average. Without those yards, Tennessee would have won the game.

A Vols’ victory would have been assured by an outstanding game from quarterback Hendon Hooker AND because the Vols defense held the Ole Miss passing game in check. Corral passed for 231 yards but with his lowest completion percentage (55.2%) of the season. Going into the Tennessee game, Corral had completed 69.2% of his passes.

Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss may pay a price for all the Tennessee hits on Corral. Kiffin said on Tuesday, he did not expect his star QB to play against LSU on Saturday.

On Saturday, as Alabama Football runs its UT win streak to 15 games, I’ll be rooting for a 50-point beatdown. If that doesn’t happen, a reason why is Josh Heupel is doing a pretty good job in Knoxville. I still refuse to credit Danny White for anything of value, except hiring Nate Oats at Buffalo.

Speaking again of hating the Vols (and why not) Phil Fulmer will always be at the top of my list for disdain, followed by all the men in the Majors’ clan and then Peyton – so Danny White is not alone.