If you check the Southeastern Conference baseball standings today you'll find Tony Vitello's Tennessee Volunteers ranked No. 18 nationally and standing 9-9 in league play and 31-11 overall following Tuesday night's victory over Gardner-Webb.
A quick peek at the SEC softball standings finds Ralph and Karen Weekly's Vols holding a No. 9 ranking and a 34-10 overall record.
The UT men's tennis team just finished second to Mississippi State. The volleyball team under first-year coach Eve Rackham reached the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2012.
Then there's the men's basketball team, which rose to No. 1 in the nation during the regular season and came within a questionable foul call of facing eventual national champion Virginia for a spot in the Final Four.
Point is, the last time the entire Big Orange athletic department was on this kind of roll might have been, um, never?
To check the years that UT baseball, men's and women's basketball and softball all reached the NCAA tournament in the same calendar year is to find a null set. At least until this year, assuming that Vitello's Vols can continue their fine play over the next three weeks.
It's enough to return longtime Vols followers to the 1970s, when the late Pat Summitt was building a women's basketball dynasty with the Lady Vols, the Ernie and Bernie Show was putting men's basketball on the cover of Sports Illustrated, men's track was running away with an NCAA outdoors title in 1974 and the remarkable Ray Bussard was overseeing an NCAA swimming championship in 1978.
And while he can't take credit for all the coaching hires that seem to be pointing to a Tennessee athletics renaissance, athletic director Phillip Fulmer certainly deserves some credit for his oft-stated belief that "It's amazing what you can accomplish when we're all pulling in the same direction."
A former SEC athletic director once told me that the key to winning in "minor" - or Olympic sports, as those nonrevenue entities are often referred to now - was spending money. That would be money for salaries, money for facilities, money for travel and such to boost a sport's profile with recruits.
In this age of rising costs and lowered state funding for education, reasonable folks could argue whether any public university should do more than the minimum to field a team that's going to run in the red regardless of how much or little you spend on it.
But it could also be argued that any program worth having is worth giving it every reasonable chance to succeed.
Or as Fulmer also often has said, "A rising tide lifts all boats."
In other words, seeing the softball team win motivates the baseball team. The tennis teams' performances inspire the golf teams. All this success might even finally return the football program to the glory it once enjoyed when Fulmer was going 45-5 as the Vols head coach from 1995 to 1998.
Again, Fulmer didn't hire Vitello. Former AD John Currie did. But Fulmer did hire Rackham to coach volleyball. He did make the difficult decision to part company with Lady Vols coach Holly Warlick, which included a $750,000 buyout. Given the early good work apparently done by new women's basketball coach Kellie Jolly Harper in holding together the bulk of the roster and recruiting class, he appears to have also made a wise decision on that hire, if only to appease a difficult-to-please Lady Vols fan base.
Then there's the work he put in to hold onto men's basketball coach Rick Barnes, who was seriously considering leaving for UCLA after winning the Naismith national coach of the year award earlier this month.
That effort required coming up with a serious increase in salary for both Barnes and his staff on short notice. Fulmer didn't flinch. Instead, as he recently told 247Sports.com: "We've been through a lot of change and different things. We weren't going to let someone come in here and buy a coach without putting up a great fight."
The big fight always will involve football, something Fulmer knows more than a little about and something that may ultimately define his UT legacy for better or worse, depending on whether Jeremy Pruitt can return the Vols to something approaching the success his boss once enjoyed on his way to winning the 1998 national championship.
But almost everywhere else atop Rocky Top, the athletic department is performing better and trending better than it has in years, if not decades, since Fulmer took over the department in the late autumn of 2017.
"We've invested here in people," Fulmer said in the 247Sports story. "We're in this to compete for championships on the conference and national level."
Less than two years into his tenure as AD, they appear to be competing quite nicely.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.