Mark WiedmerKNOXVILLE - All you wanted was hope if you were a University of Tennessee football fan sitting inside Neyland Stadium on Saturday night.
Oh, sure, you would have liked to see the Vols upset Florida 20 years after a far better UT squad shocked a seemingly better bunch of Gators on the way to an undefeated season and the 1998 national championship.
And so many of those former Vols legends returned for this one, basking in their past glory and success, shown the love time and time again by the 100,027 who almost filled Neyland this time around.
Before the game, one of the defensive backs on that team, Fred White, even said of this current Big Orange bunch, the one that began Saturday with a 2-1 record, "I don't care what Georgia's doing, we will be back very soon."
Then this year's Vols kicked it off, and the Gators forced six turnovers and Florida won 47-21, which just happens to be the most points the Rowdy Reptiles have ever scored inside Neyland.
It was all enough to make first-year coach Jeremy Pruitt say of the Vols' 13th loss to the Gators over the past 14 seasons: "We've got to give Florida a lot of credit for outplaying us for 60 minutes tonight. They executed better than we did, and that's on me."
Some will argue it could have been worse. Florida was just 1-of-5 on third-down conversions in the opening half. It lost its only fumble of the game. The Vols, despite trailing 26-3 at halftime, owned the football for 5:44 longer than the victors during the first two periods.
Then again, Pruitt argued he might have made the final margin look better had he not ordered a goal-line defense after Florida took over at the Vols' 47 after a failed onside kick.
"If they break the line of scrimmage, you know they're going to score," he said, "but when you're down 19, what's the difference in giving up 40 or 47?"
Good point.
So for all you glass-half-full Volniacs, there were a few bright spots going forward. In fact, take away those unbelievable, unexplainable, unforgivable six turnovers, and Tennessee actually played a fairly decent game, actually recording four more first downs than the Gators (18-14) and owning the football for almost nine more minutes (34:17 to 25:35).
That's not to say much of anything was great, mind you. Certainly nothing necessarily worthy of the Big Orange Nation making a return trip to Neyland in expectation of a Tennessee win, at least until Charlotte comes calling Nov. 3.
After all, this was the Southeastern Conference game Tennessee appeared most likely to win over its ridiculously difficult five-game stretch of Florida, at Georgia, at Auburn, versus Alabama and at South Carolina.
And if the Vols' best chance at a league victory ended in a 26-point loss, that 4-8 season they turned in a year ago just might become 3-9 this season.
Of course, that assumes they go 0-8 again in conference play, and there is certainly a lot of football to be played by all 14 teams between now and then. While the Vols would almost certainly appear to headed for an 0-5 conference start, they could still knock off Kentucky inside Neyland on Nov. 10, or Missouri on Nov. 17 or win the season finale at Vanderbilt on Nov. 24.
It's also quite possible Tennessee will be favored in none of those.
That said, Pruitt said of his team's fight this night: "I saw guys who had a look in their eyes, they were competing; that's something that we can build on."
Want an example of that look, of that mentality that Pruitt so longs to build in a program that hasn't been in a top-tier bowl game since the year after that 1998 national title?
Said center Ryan Johnson: "We were running the ball well and passing the ball well, but we kept shooting ourselves in the foot."
Two plays to at least partly explain a 26-point loss.
First: On fourth-and-1 at their 45, the Vols called a brilliant play in which quarterback Jarrett Guarantano hit tight end Austin Pope for a 51-yard gain to the Florida 4. Only Pope lost the ball at that point, the fumble running through the end zone for a touchback that returned the ball to the Gators.
Second: On the second-half kickoff, Tennessee fumbled the ball to the Gators again, Florida scoring on the first play from scrimmage to lead 33-3. So much for a packed house or a national championship reunion delivering a repeat Big Orange dream come true 20 years later.
To make all this even worse, redshirt junior linebacker Quarte Sapp has apparently played his last game for the Vols after refusing to enter the game late in the second quarter. Pruitt wouldn't say he was dismissed, but he wouldn't say the player wasn't, either.
What isn't murky or unclear at this moment is Tennessee's performances against Power Five conference foes. The Vols have played two. They opened the year with a 40-13 loss to West Virginia. They've now fallen 47-21 to Florida. A visit to No. 2 Georgia comes next Saturday.
"Our guys are learning lessons," Pruitt said. "I can tell you that."
For the foreseeable future, those lessons figure to be quite painful in nature.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.