Tracking the zeitgeist through college football’s opening weekend.

I like that when we play overseas, we send Navy. Just in case.

— Brody Logan (@BrodyLogan) September 1, 2012

Mark Richt has lost control of my bougainvilleas.instagr.am/p/PC6_QMrv3n/

— sarah sprague (@sarah_sprague) September 1, 2012

Casual Todd Blackledge is disconcerting, like seeing your teacher at the grocery store

— Bobby Big Wheel (@BobbyBigWheel) September 1, 2012

Somewhere, I imagine Derek Dooley’s mom visibly seething that her son is on national television with his shirt untucked like a heathen.

— Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) September 1, 2012

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Tyler Bray attempting a quarterback sneak went about how you’d imagine it would. (AP)

ATLANTA — One data point is almost worse than none, honestly. We’ve said all summer that we don’t know what to make of this Tennessee team, thanks to a 2011 season rendered almost entirely useless for data-collecting purposes by injuries. After seeing the Vols conquer North Carolina State 35-21, we still know practically nothing, and Derek Dooley will be the first to point that out. [RECAP | BOX SCORE]

“It’s one game,” Dooley said. “All that matters is we’re 1-0, and we have to clean up a ton of mistakes.”

That to-fix list surprisingly contains no interceptions from junior quarterback Tyler Bray, who displayed some wonky mechanics at times but played a fairly clean game with big results, completing 27-of-41 passes for 333 yards and two touchdowns. What could have been a third touchdown, depending on where you were sitting in the stadium when Bray attempted a poorly considered quarterback sneak, was ruled a fumble in the waning seconds of the first half.

Tennessee did put one looming question to rest Friday night, in the matter of Da’Rick Rogers’ recently vacated Z receiver position. Juco import Cordarrelle Patterson blew past All-America corner David Amerson for the game’s first score three-and-a-half minutes into the game and added another touchdown on a 67-yard end-around in the first quarter’s final minute. Patterson had six catches for 93 yards and 72 yards on the ground. Dooley, sticking to this one data point, assessed Patterson thusly: “He’s big and fast and can catch the ball.” We cannot argue with his logic. Justin Hunter, in his first game since tearing his ACL in Week 3 last season, had nine catches for 73 yards.

Amerson would be outmatched again in the first quarter, losing out to Zach Rogers on a 72-yard touchdown catch that set off a 16-point Tennessee scoring burst (touchdown, safety, Patterson’s scoring run) to end the period. Asked after the game if he felt he’d been targeted, the 2011 national interceptions leader agreed, “I guess you could say so.”

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In two weeks and two days, the 2012 college football season will commence. Between now and then, Derek Dooley’s hair will not move. Not an inch to the west. Not an inch to the east. It will not. 

16 days.

Derek Dooley has posted an 11-14 record in two seasons as Tennessee’s head coach. (AP)

Gentle readers,

You are intelligent, good-looking people who do not need to be told that some college football coaches may lose their jobs this season. They will lose their jobs eventually because they did not win enough football games. They are in danger of losing their jobs right now because they did not win enough football games in the past. None of this is rocket surgery.

But between all the drive-time radio rants and FIRECOACH_____DOTCOM blogs, are there elements setting the temperature of coaches’ posteriors that we have not considered? To find out, we recruited a half-dozen fans and bloggers surrounding some of the most hotly debated coaching positions. Some of them wanted to defend their skippers. Some of them are Boston College fans. Read on to find out which is which:

Derek Dooley, Tennessee

• Campus Union: The point we keep coming back to regarding Dooley’s reign at Tennessee is that so many things seem to happen to the team that it’s hard to get a clear read on where the Vols really are at any given time. That said, a losing record for two straight years does not bode well for the lifespan of any coach in God’s Own Football Conference. And that’s before getting to the part where Dooley now has to live with being the guy who snapped the Kentucky win streak. So what are we missing in our rush to condemn the tenure of the SEC’s greatest active hairdo? Will Shelton of Rocky Top Talk has one answer:

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Derek Dooley feels better about Tennessee’s 2012 squad than his first two teams in Knoxville. (AP)

HOOVER, Ala. – ”As if these weren’t painful enough, they added a couple more of us.” Derek Dooley took the stage at SEC Media Days with his typical grim humor, but professed to be more confident in his Tennessee Volunteers than in his first two seasons.

“It’s been a tough four years in Tennessee,” Dooley said. “The SEC has enjoyed taking advantage of our tough times.” But while he won’t say the Vols have arrived, ”I feel better today about where we are as a program than at any point since I’ve been in Knoxville. And I mean that.”

“For the first time, we have a solid roster. We have a full 85 on scholarship. We have 19 starters back.” Dooley cited the offensive line as a “microcosm” of the rest of the team: Two years ago Tennessee fielded a combined three starts on the offensive line; it has a combined 106 heading into 2012.

One notable exception is projected starting left tackle Tiny Richardson (whom you might remember from our spring visit to Knoxville), who exceeded Dooley’s expectations in spring prep but “hasn’t been out in the fire yet,” said Dooley. “He hasn’t been sitting there on third-and-eight … he’s gonna have some growing pains.” How much bigger a 6-foot-6, 329-pound lineman can expect to grow is perhaps best left to the imagination. Then again, reminded Dooley, when considering the freshmen-laden rosters Tennessee has worked with the past couple seasons, as a rising sophomore Richardson is “really a wily veteran.”

The Volunteers are looking to outrun the actual and metaphorical storm clouds gathering over Neyland.
(Holly Anderson/SI)

Man plans, God laughs

Tennessee’s Derek Dooley estimated at last summer’s SEC Media Days that he’d be taking the field in the fall with a roster composed of 70 percent freshmen and sophomores. He’s got 19 returning starters for 2012, mostly juniors now. But is that a positive, given last season’s gutting, galling results? Dooley paused for a moment in his office on the afternoon of his third spring game as head coach of the Vols. “You know, that’s a good question.”

The Vols went 5-7 in 2011. Tennessee’s last 5-7 season, in 2008, followed a 10-win 2007 campaign and division title for Phil Fulmer. It was his second losing season in 16 full years as UT’s head coach, and it got him fired. Dooley is now 11-14 in two seasons on Rocky Top, where new university leadership thought a fourth head coach in five years might be a bit much. But in six years? Almost sounds reasonable in these impatient times, where coaches like Turner Gill are being canned two years into massive rebuilding projects like Kansas.  Three years is almost certainly not enough time in which to judge Dooley’s reign in Knoxville given the maelstrom of misery he inherited, but if Tennessee doesn’t turn it around on the field in 2012, it’s almost certainly all he will get.

“We’re not there yet,” Dooley told SI.com, tracing the scars on the Volunteers left by Fulmer’s ousting and Lane Kiffin’s subsequent bolting. ”But all those anchors are in the past. Between three head coaches in three years, five strength coaches in that short time, a change in the presidential level, a change at the athletic director level, the NCAA cloud hanging over our program, and of course all the attrition. It put us in a challenging position, but the good news is, that’s a thing of the past. We have a lot more maturity. We’re a little bit older.

“And sometimes, when you have a really bad season, there’s the embarrassment pushing you, of ‘We don’t want this to happen again.’”

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A lovingly curated selection of our favorite stories from the past week to speed you through your Friday:

A message from the Catlab Foundation For A Better Life.

• Playoff advocates kissing nurses in the street! V-BCS Day is upon us, yet somehow the hysterically misnamed EVERY GAME COUNTS Facebook page remains standing.

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Paul Johnson and Jon Barry won the 2011 Chick-fil-A Bowl Challenge charity golf tournament. Paul Johnson is clearly as bewildered as we are to learn he excels at the serene sport of golf. (Abell Images)

The Chick-fil-A Bowl’s annual charity golf tournament kicks off this weekend, forcing 16 ACC and SEC skippers to mute their phones (probably), partner up with celebrity alums from their current programs and battle for scholarship dollars in the carefully sculpted wilds of Georgia. The pairings for the main event have been released. We have some thoughts.

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Assorted bits of light reading to speed you through your Friday.

• Fear the Fruit. Delta State’s “Fear the Okra” campaign continues to delight and horrify in equal measure.

• Welcome to the College Football Hall of Fame Tent, sponsored by Coca-Cola. We prefer to think this is just a power play enacted as sort of a protest movement against those who would block the enshrinement of Stephen Garcia’s hair.

• What, no Sam Bradford? Starting Monday, you can vote for RGIII’s EA Sports sidekick.

• All in the graven idol game. Auburn’s Heis-men statues will be unveiled at the Tigers’ spring game. We’re holding out for a statue of Pat Dye.

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It won't be long before Derek Dooley's next PR misfire, but it's best to wait before slugging him in the blogosphere. (AP)

Derek Dooley is a weird guy. This is not a slight. Mike Leach and Les Miles are strange fellows in much the same fashion, and they have turned out all right. Dooley’s a big ol’ nerd, a former practicing lawyer trained to think steps ahead. One of the problems with his new gig is that he doesn’t always remember to take the rest of the room with him. With three lessons in our hip pockets now to choose from, let’s all start waiting a couple days after every perceived Precious misfire before hauling off and slugging him in the blogosphere, OK? He’s weird, but he’s never quite as weird as we think he is. It bodes well to wait.

You may recall the freshman Tennessee coach making headlines last season for ostensibly comparing his squad to Nazis. He didn’t, exactly, and even the local paper didn’t realize right away what he was up to. You wouldn’t have caught his Rommel reference without having seen the 1962 Academy Award-winning film The Longest Day. (Check it out, if you’re a WWII buff or just like war movies.) To the layperson’s way of thinking, being well-versed in midcentury historical dramas shouldn’t be necessary to understand what one’s beloved team’s head ballcoach is saying. To Dooley, it might never occur to him that everybody hasn’t seen that movie and every other he might care to reference. As a fevered devotee of made-for-cable creature films that show up on the SciFi channel at 2 a.m., I like that about him.

This week, a two-fer of would-be PR faceplants: Does Tennessee have a sign reading “OPPORTUNITY IS NOWHERE” in its locker room? And did Dooley mean he wants all his players to be charged with manslaughter when he said former player Leonard Little represents what Tennessee football is all about?

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