Spring games are naturally dull.
There’s no stakes and little juice, and mostly, the glorified scrimmages are only remembered by folks’ paralysis by over analysis.
“Oh, Johnnie did awesome today. Just watch, he’ll start this fall.”
“Timmy stinks. He won’t help them.”
Cut to the season where Johnnie rides the bench and Timmy is out there making plays.
These days, as college coaches continue to treat their programs like the Soviets hiding state secrets back in the '70s, spring games have become increasingly irrelevant. Most games are now on TV, turning the perfunctory event into the most boring two-hour infomercial for a team’s program.
And yet, coaches from Jeremy Pruitt to Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney continue to try and gin up interest all in the name of recruiting.
Naturally, Saban and Swinney have a much easier sales pitches these days. But Tennessee is currently in a staring contest with its own passionate fan base.
What's the real incentive to show up next Saturday night?
A year ago, coming off its worst season in school history and the most dysfunctional coaching search in recent memory, Tennessee managed to fill Neyland with roughly 50,000 fans.
It was legitimately a solid showing considering the previous nine months on the Hill.
Afterward, Pruitt called the Vol Walk “spectacular,” but the head coach was less than impressed with the overall attendance.
“I think we all need to look in the mirror and see who we want to be,” he said.
The comments didn’t sit well with fans, but they also didn’t haunt Pruitt for the rest of 2018. Folks moved on and fans still got excited about the upcoming season.
But after another tough fall, Pruitt’s latest pleas to fans have seemingly fallen on deaf ears.
Tennessee’s head coach has spent the last few months saying the quiet part out loud: Spring games are about all recruiting. Come for the watered down football, stay as a useful prop.
On Tuesday, Pruitt once again implored Vol Nation to fill Neyland Stadium on April 13 (6 p.m., SEC Network) in an effort to support recruiting. Tennessee players and assistant coaches have issued their own PSA’s, too.
“The best recruiters you have is your players to start with because they know what happens day-in and day-out. We have really good recruiters on our team,” Pruitt said.
“Moving the signing days up, the timetable has moved up in recruiting, so the more people we have at Neyland, the better selling point it is for our football program and the University of Tennessee. And it’s not just football. It is all sports. So everybody takes advantage of the spring game to recruit. There is going to be a lot of things going on that weekend. I know our players are excited about it. And I am excited about it. I am looking forward to it.
“We need our stadium full.”
That’s not going to happen. Not even close this year.
To repeat, spring games are designed to be mundane. The previous 14 practices are about player development and avoiding injuries. There's not a single coach in the country concerned with scheming to win some faux-scrimmage just for fan entertainment. The fact that thousands still pack stadiums across the country anyways is rather remarkable in the first place.
But I’ve never covered a spring with less enthusiasm or fan interest than the one Tennessee is currently in the middle of.
I swear this isn’t some plea just for more access (although that would be nice!), but with a few open individual periods of practice each week, the media has a limited scope of Pruitt’s 2019 team, which means the majority of fans know next to nothing.
They certainly don’t really *know* Tennessee’s players, a particularly notable juxtaposition to the ballyhooed basketball team that was full of personalities. None of that helps generate interest for folks to attend something they can causally watch from their couch while they also flip channels and catch the end of The Masters’ moving day. A postgame concert or player autographs might help, but Tennessee isn’t doing that either. The only saving grace at this point might be the SEC green-lighting the sale of alcohol tomorrow.
Pruitt is paid $4 million to run his program how he best sees fit, and Tennessee’s head coach knows far more about readying a team for the fall than I’ll ever know. Every coach wants to control the narrative about his program, too, and it’s Pruitt’s prerogative to present a rather nameless, faceless approach.
That only works if you're winning though. Coming off a 5-7 season with another offseason veiled in secrecy, begging fans to come to an event mainly as a prop for recruiting is a tough sell. Programs aren't entitled to fan support. It has to be earned.
Vol Nation is as rabid a fan base as any in the country, but based on a decade in the making, Tennessee is playing with fire in terms of fan apathy. The Vols didn't sell out a single home game a year ago, including the finale against Missouri with a bowl berth on the line.
Everybody is trying to figure out ways to incentivize folks into attending live events these days, but considering the current climate around the Vols, that's an even dicier dilemma for Tennessee’s football program right now.
