Mark Wiedmer
With Will Holden (74) celebrating in the background, Ralph Webb (7) heads toward the endzone for touchdown that would put Vanderbilt up 45 to 34 over Tennessee. The Tennessee Volunteers visited the Vanderbilt Commodores in a cross-state rivalry at Dudley Stadium on November 26, 2016. NASHVILLE – Do you want it? Or do you need it?
If you posed that question to the Vanderbilt football team prior to its Saturday night visit from Tennessee, the answer was obvious. The Commodores needed to beat Tennessee. Desperately. Otherwise their 2016 football season could come to a bowl-less conclusion, barring an academic reprieve for their five wins.
Just it had throughout all but seven of the 111 times the two schools met on the gridiron.
So Vanderbilt played like a desperate team and Tennessee played like a discombobulated team and the Commodores won 45-34 to become bowl eligible and quite likely erase any chance the Vols had to go to the Sugar Bowl for the first time since the close of the 1990 season.
In words that sounded eerily like something UT coach Butch Jones expects his players to say, Vanderbilt quarterback Kyle Shurmur noted at the close of his 416-yard passing night and two touchdown passes, “We just wanted to focus on winning today.”