KNOXVILLE - The clear class clown of Team 120, redshirt running back Alvin Kamara attempted to run last Friday's Tennessee football media day with the help of a purloined megaphone.
"Media, you've got two minutes left to talk to Jalen Reeves-Maybin!" he shouted. "Two minutes. No more."
As a distracted Reeves-Maybin lost his train of thought, Kamara continued his countdown, his smile growing by the second, "Members of the media, you now have one and a half minutes to interview Jalen Reeves-Maybin."
Later, when someone asked him what he'd done to become the maestro of the megaphone, Kamara replied, "I found it over there."
"You mean you stole it," chided one media type.
"No, I borrowed it," Kamara said with a grin.
But what he said next was no laughing matter to Big Orange foes this season. Putting his hijinks on hiatus for a moment, the onetime Alabama signee answered a question about why he didn't head to the NFL draft after last season as follows:
"You don't owe anybody anything in this business. But I felt I owed it to these guys to stay here. I wanted to come back and help my teammates do something special."
In today's college athletic world, where winning seems the only thing that matters, only national championships are truly special. However, given how long it's been since the Vols won a Southeastern Conference championship (also 1998), exiting the Georgia Dome with a victory on Dec. 3 would also be quite an accomplishment.
Either way, the more you're around this team, the more you begin to feel something special, that sense of unity and purpose and camaraderie that most championship units possess.
"Everywhere else I've been, the offense hangs out with the offense and the defense hangs out with the defense. There's not a lot of interaction," continued Kamara, who also played a season of junior college ball after leaving Alabama. "Even if it's just going out to eat or kickin' it and watching TV, this team enjoys doing it together."
It's just talk today, of course. Not a single game has been played. Everybody's 0-0. Alabama. Tennessee. Georgia. Vanderbilt. Virginia Tech.
"What we've started here and where we want to go was a big factor in me coming back," said defensive back Cam Sutton, who also considered a jump to the NFL after last season. "We're trying to do some special things around here. We want to do more than win a (Outback) Bowl. We want to leave our mark on this program."
To look around Neyland Stadium on Friday during picture day was to be reminded of basketball commentator Dick Vitale's All-Airport Team.
"I don't know if they can play, but they'd sure look good walking through an airport," Dicky V would say, his point being that whoever he was talking about looked the part of a great player.
This team looks the part. Big. Chiseled. Focused. Together.
It doesn't mean it will stay that way through the season. Even if Tennessee arrives for Alabama's visit on Oct. 15 with a 7-0 record, it will be playing for a sixth straight Saturday against a Crimson Tide bunch playing its seventh straight Saturday. The Vols should beat Bama for the first time since 2006, but UT will no longer have an off week the week before the Bama game in order to arrive at that game with fresh legs against a weary Tide team. The element of surprise will also be gone, as it figures to be against every other top opponent.
For the first time since the late 1990s, Tennessee will be the hunted rather than the hunter against the SEC's best. Not that the Vols seem terribly concerned.
Said defensive lineman Derek Barnett, who was less than 3 years old the last time UT won it all: "Everybody's got high expectations on this team. I think everybody thinks about our legacy. I think everybody's ready to play their role the best they can."
So what does Barnett think it will ultimately take to do something really special, something that will make this team's legacy not only that of champion, but also the team that brought the Vols back from mediocrity inside the toughest conference in college football?
"We need to play really good football," he said.
And that's always easier when everyone on the team does everything together both on the field and off it, ready to play their roles as best they can, determined to be accomplish something special enough to shout from a megaphone for the first time in 18 Big Orange autumns.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.