A difficult Saturday is coming for Tennessee football. Victories against Georgia are as hard to come by as victories against Florida, but they’re still tough.
And when they come, locate that someone (or someone) with a T on their helmet has done something exceptional to get to the end line of the flight.
Here are some examples that come to mind:
1969: Side Curt Watson, the best weapon for a rainy afternoon in Athens.
Watson drove a (then) school-record 197 yards on the court to lead the Tennessee No. 3 to a 17-3 victory that put the Flights on the road to an SEC name last season from Doug Dickey.
1994: A 41-23 victory in Athens was Todd Helton’s most productive hour in his brief time as Tennessee quarterback, but it was also James “Little Man” Stewart’s most productive hour in a longer race to (for a while) UT’s most productive runner of all time.
Stewart scored four times in the direction of a 211-yard night. His two touchdowns in the 4th quarter, 71 yards, kept Georgia at bay.
Stewart is third in the career standings of UT, Travis Henry and Arian Foster with 2,890 yards.
1995: Jeff Hall leads Tennessee with 371 points and launched two winning boxes in his senior year to put flights in position to win the 1998 national championship.
But on September 9, 1995, Hall, a new brother-in-law, bet his game for the time being. He had already scored two goals in the previous area at night. With the score of 27-27, the flights needed a third.
Hall kicked 34 yards with 10 seconds to play, which gave Tennessee his fifth straight win over the Bulldogs.
1995-97: Peyton Manning never had the most productive in Florida, however, he had the Georgia issue. In three games against the Bulldogs, Manning has accumulated 1,063 air yards.
He surpassed 371 yards in a 29-17 victory in Athens in 1996. In his senior year, he achieved 31 of 40 for 343 yards and four touchdowns in a 38-13 win over the 13th-13th Dawgs.
1998: Manning left, but Tennessee’s decade of dominance continues with a 22-3 victory on the road. A week after THE end-of-season injury of UT star Jamal Lewis, Georgia was the favorite in a top 10 clash.
The game is remembered in the context of the UT national championship crusade when the junior quarterback of the day, Tee Martin, took off, in the middle of the moment.
But I’m giving that ball shape to the defense. Al Wilson, Shaun Ellis, Deon Grant, Dwayne Goodrich and the corporate kept Georgia 59 yards on the ground, produced four ball losses and limited the Bulldogs’ offense to 22 minutes, thirteen seconds of possession.
1999: The most productive thing that happened to Leonard Scott in 1999 to win the NCAA’s 60-meter race name in March. October isn’t bad either.
Georgia had reduced Tennessee’s lead 30-7 to 30-20 in the last quarter and the momentum had changed. Scott started and ran a hundred yards. Tennessee’s 37-20 victory is his ninth consecutive victory over the Bulldogs.
2004: Erik Ainge’s first outing is not an ideal setting. The Vols were losers by 12 1/2 issues in 3rd place, with Georgia, who owns a 17-game winning streak at home. The rookie handed over two TD passes and the Flights caused a massive surprise, 19-14, that would propel them to the SEC championship game.
2015: Joshua Dobbs stands out for the 2016 Hail Mary to beat Georgia, and was even older the previous year when the flights hosted a disappointing 38-31.
Dobbs pitched for 312 yards, ran for 118 more and represented five touchdowns, which led UT to return from a 24-3 deficit.
Who’s next?
Mike Strange is a former sentinel of the news. Lately, I’m writing a weekly column for Shopper News.