Mark WiedmerKNOXVILLE – Six-year-old Jurnee Scott couldn’t believe her eyes. There stood her father, University of Tennessee assistant football coach Larry Scott, in the family’s den this past Saturday afternoon, emphasis on afternoon.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Daddy, you’re in the house and the sun’s up,'” Scott recalled during a Wednesday morning interview. “She almost never sees that during football season.”
But this past Saturday was the Vols’ one bye week of the 2016 season, or as UT head coach Butch Jones dubbed it, Family Day.
So Jones, Scott and the rest of the Vols staff had one weekend day to be with their families, to be like everybody else in the South, right down to “watching a couple of football games.”
Only Scott didn’t watch a lot of football. He played with his children and hung out with his wife and tried to temporarily escape the normally inescapable pressure of Southeastern Conference football.