But I think his presupposition is that the SEC must be better than the Pac-10. Well, not last night, Fulmer. Hey, I applaud you for trying to say the right things to your fan base, but if your fanbase believes the same thing, then it is left with two conclusions from your statement: 1) “Crap, its going to be a long season”, and 2) then “it’s up to the coaching staff to uncork that potential, or else.”

Stay Classy, Phil

His statement has 2 parts, first is that they will play better teams this year. Given that his team still has to play Florida and Georgia, I think he is right.

Next he claimed that his team is better than they played, a backward way of saying they did not play well. Again, I agree. They did not play well at all, they were intimidated by how aggressive our players were and their qb looked terrible.

Tennessee is a better team than they showed last night. They will win several games in the SEC and might even contend for a conference title. They were not prepared to handle everything that our coaches and players threw at them and made plenty of mistakes.

The truth is, both teams were better than they played. Craft will probably never throw 4 interceptions in a game again and we will likely never lose so many players to injury in the same game again. Some of those lost drives will turn into scores on offense. Tennessee will probably shore up its passing game (although I do understand that a complex passing game might be asking too much out of the SEC) and their QB will likely not be rattled so easily again.

This was a first game, both teams will play better as the season goes on. Fulmer admitted as much about his own team and was generally pretty classy, very different from what we hear out of south central. They still think that was the best team of the last 25 years.