Kind off-topic from your post: I like the idea of having Knowles coach from the sidelines. He's coached from the press-box before. Makes me wonder if that was part of the deal in coming here, coach from the field.
AP says anything that gets people to pay attention to him, and from my experience working in media positivity almost never drives traffic like negativity does. I'm not saying Tennessee does or doesn't have what it needs at any position. None of us know, Price and the VQ crew included. No one will even have a true inkling for two to two and a half months when spring practice begins, but they can't wait until then for traffic to the podcast to spike. Gotta keep that momentum going.
Respectfully, that's a straw man argument. This is strictly about the DL, where we simply don't have enough bodies and at the same time it's a position where playing young guys is rarely if ever a recipe for success. That doesn't mean I think Campbell/Utley/House and the 10 true freshmen suck; quite the contrary, I think we've got some outstanding young DL prospects in the pipeline. But in the portal era there's just no reason to have the bulk of your DL be young (and light, but that's a different story). It's completely avoidable and yet other than Gilliam (huge pickup!) we seem to have decided that once we missed on our next few targets we just were going to stop trying. And ultimately that's likely to bite us in the butt come next season.
Light you can address, and youth/experience is impossible to fix from the bench. I'd argue part of what happened to us last year is about leaning too heavily on the veterans with the COVID exemptions extending playing careers. We simply weren't getting young guys enough run, so they were as untested as they were young. Add in that this portal cycle was light on quality at DT, and this was arguably inevitable.
The selling of VQ changed how they behave, what access they have, and generally how useless they’ve become. They have to be nice dogs til the earnout is done. It’s just an advertising platform with repetitive blather in between. They spend all their energy trying to extend a single point into ten minutes to fill the segments between the two minute commercials. The AD has basically frozen them out over some big gaffes in their judgment. You can hear that in their pissy comments. At this point there is zero real reporting from any beat reporter, podcaster etc. It’s all hot air.
We are fine at DT. We will be bigger and stronger. We can go 3 deep with all 6 over 300 by fall, which is the magic number someone evidently created to not get shoved around.
Callahan might be the closest thing to a reporter who does the work, but the bar is absurdly low. No one has the patience do develop long stories over time, and none of them are willing to gamble access to break early information either. You’re stuck with editorial commentary, and none of them are smart enough to handle that. Rucker obviously has a higher IQ than Hubbs, but that’s like comparing your dog to a hammer. I don’t really want to listen to the opinions of either.
