I'm not sold on Tennessee being some kind of juggernaut..I think the score of last year's game was about as flukey as they come..if you look at the common opponents that Kentucky and Tennessee had last year the scores were almost the exact same (actually we probably played a little bit better against Fla, Mizz, S. Car) it was just that we caught Tennessee in the middle of that losing streak where for some reason or another we weren't playing even close to what we were earlier in the season..Tennessee will be solid this year, but they're far from being some kind of team that we can't beat, especially at home..if you would've stuck South Carolina and Florida in the back half of our schedule last year both of those teams would've blown us out..we were just a totally different team in the second half of the year and I felt like they kind of mailed it in a little bit..I know Georgia and Tennessee were better than us, but they weren't better than us like those scores indicated..at that point our young guys and the coaching staff had just mailed it in and seemed to be playing for next year by the time we caught those two on the schedule..I noticed a real difference in the way the coaching staff talked in the first half of the year and the second..in the first the coaches never made any excuses about their depth, but after that LSU game I noticed a totally different attitude coming from them when they talked (not that I can blame them a whole lot, but still)
They started talking about what they didn't have instead of what they did..I remember in the first half in the season Stoops was asked about depth several times and if it was a problem or if it was lacking, and Stoops would respond by saying "I don't want to comment on that because I don't want to give these guys an out or an excuse," but in the second half of the season that was completely different, that's exactly what started happening..you could just tell the coaches and players had just acknowledged in several of those games that they didn't have the depth and kind of felt like what's the point in killing ourself?'..Stoops started talking about how they didn't have the depth, and you could just sense that in their minds they felt like they might as well mail it in because they were beat before the game even started..there were several games where Stoops just took his headset off as soon as the second half started and just stood there not saying a word to any coaches or players the entire half..it was pretty obvious he was mailing it in once we got in a little bit of a hole in several of those games..I think he convinced himself that our depth was a little bit worse than it actually was...I don't know what happened in the second half of the season, I know we really lacked depth, but if we can beat South Carolina and (basically) beat Florida and take the #1 team in the nation to the wire and (almost) beat another top-25 team on the road and then go on the road and have a chance to beat the East-division champ we never should've have gotten blown out by Georgia and Tennessee like we did..I put a lot of that on the coaching staff and I'm confident they'll be better this year..they've mentioned how they need to be more consistent this year, and I think they will be..we saw flashes of what our talent can do last year, now we just need to put it together every single time out, not just 8 or 9 games out of 12, we can't coast on talent, we have to bring it every single week in the SEC..we mailed in that Georgia and Tennessee game (and LSU) last year, but we had a lot of young players that were learning what SEC football is about, and a head coach that's still feeling his way through being the leader of a program...we didn't fight back like we did in every other game that season, but we'll be better this year...I think we'll have a good chance to beat Tennessee at home this year
![[cheers]](https://ct.yimg.com/mr/uploads/891/5628.gif "Cheers [cheers]")
