Mark WiedmerKNOXVILLE - With 12:41 to go Saturday afternoon, Tennessee football coach Butch Jones figuratively threw in the towel against No. 1 Alabama. Not that you could overly blame him, given that 42-10 hole his Volunteers found themselves in at that moment.
Still, when you're down by 32 points and you've got a fourth-and-1 at your own 34, what would it hurt to go for it instead of punting? How much worse could it possibly get, other than a slightly more lopsided final score? If nothing else, do you have any better chance to win the game by voluntarily giving up the football?
No.
A thousand times no.
And what was the result of that punt? Did it stop the bleeding? Stem the Tide, so to speak? Not exactly.
Two plays after that passive punt, Bama running back Bo Scarbrough turned a second-and-9 at the Tide 15 into an 85-yard touchdown run and a 49-10 lead, which became the final score a little less than 12 minutes later.
"They're the No. 1 team in the country," Jones said afterward. "Rightfully so."
And Tennessee remains locked in the No. 1 slot for most beaten up team in the land, its original group of starters for the season opener against Appalachian State basically cut in half as it heads into this off week with a 5-2 record, but with losses in its past two starts.
"We'll bounce back," Jones said. "We've put ourselves in a position to play meaningful games after the bye week."
And the Vols have. Let them win the SEC East and they'll likely face these same Crimson Tiders again atop the artificial turf of the Georgia Dome in the SEC title game. Yet given the fact that plastic grass more often helps the faster team, don't expect a second UT-Bama game to produce a vastly different result.
Yet just getting there would mean so much. Especially after what happened Saturday inside Neyland Stadium against what may well be Bama boss Nick Saban's best Crimson Tide squad. And Saban's Tiders have won four of the last seven national championships.
So whatever Volniacs think of this 10th straight loss to big, bad Bama, they are just the latest of the Tide's seven overmatched victims to date. A strange stat: The only two programs to surrender fewer than 40 points to the red elephants come from the decidedly non-football state of Kentucky. Western Kentucky lost 38-10 to Alabama inside the Tide's Bryant-Denny Stadium. Kentucky lost three weeks later in that same stadium by a 34-6 score.
Everyone else has surrendered at least 48 points.
What possibly made this Tennessee defeat seem worse is that the Bama defense held the Vols to 163 total yards and just 32 rushing yards while the Tide were running for 428 yards, including four TD sprints of 29 yards or more.
"We pride ourselves on stopping the run and running the football," Jones said. "It's a grown man's league."
A second "Ouch!" moment for the Big Orange Nation: Said Bama linebacker Shaun Dion Hamilton of UT's penchant for huge second-half rallies this season: "A team like that that's a second-half team, I mean, we're a four-quarter team."
For now, and for the foreseeable future, this grown man's league appears once more to be Alabama's league. Much as it was in the first half of the 1960s. And most of the 1970s. And undoubtedly from 2009 forward, when Saban won the first of his Tide national titles.
Merely consider that when Bama opened defense of its national championship against Southern Cal in Dallas at the start of this season, it had to replace last year's starting quarterback, last season's Heisman Trophy-winning running back and a total of four first- and second-round NFL draft picks.
This is a Tide team playing a true freshman at quarterback and a couple of running backs with little experience, and some how, some way Bama's average margin of victory heading into next week's showdown against Texas A&M is 30.4 points per game.
"We wanted to play a complete game and I'm really proud of our team," Saban told CBS as soon as this one ended. "Our defense really responded well to what happened last week (30 points allowed against Arkansas)."
Now it's Tennessee's turn to respond following a much-needed off week to recover from at least a few of its massive number of injuries.
"We can't let this divide us," said Vols quarterback Josh Dobbs, an odd choice of words given how tight this team has appeared to be all season. "We've got to focus on fundamentals, details and execution."
If Saturday be any indication, it might be time for the SEC's remaining 13 teams to focus on the fundamental truth that everyone else is playing for second, that Bama is once more the league's gold standard, and quite likely to remain that way until Saban decides he no longer wants or needs the $7.09 million yearly salary he's paid to rub the rest of the league's noses in the mud.
"It takes years to build a program, not a team," Jones said in defeat.
The Vols have now gone 10 years without a team, or a program, strong enough to knock off Bama. Going for it on fourth-and-1 and down 32 in the final quarter wasn't going to change that. But it might have at least shown that UT is going to try to win on every snap of all four quarters until the final horn.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com