I found rationalizations after the Cal game.  A couple of bad breaks.  A group of inexperienced wide receivers.  A game against a national championship contender with a handful of truly remarkable playmakers.  Maybe my boys had just rolled snake-eyes with their scheduling this year.  Maybe they could pull it together.

But then, after a brief interlude against Southern Miss, the men in orange volunteered this:

A game against the hated Gators that was less a defeat than a nationally-televised castration.  With Tim Tebow mincing around like some kind of seizure-afflicted kangaroo after his various scores, and with Urban Meyer continuing to fire bullets into the Vols' lifeless corpse, I began to realize that I had overlooked some truly ominous signs in the opening loss.  Like poor tackling.  Timid play-calling.  Mental mistakes.  These are the hallmarks of a poorly-coached team, and they don't bode well for midseason improvement.

Still, I let myself be fooled.  I saw the Volunteers open up a can on Georgia, thought at the time to represent a pretty decent team.  Maybe there was light at the end of the tunnel.  The team just needed time to jell. 

Oh, but that was before the Crimson Tide decided it was time for the Vols to learn a lesson.

Now don't get me wrong, Alabama is a pretty decent football team.  They may have a quarterback with the name of a serial killer, but Terry Grant looks like the real thing, and DJ Hall will eventually make his Sportscenter highlights on Sunday instead of Saturday.  But man for man, the Tide don't yet really stack up with Tennessee talent-wise.  This was a tough road game, but one that a good team wins.  Well, the bad news is that Tennessee is not that good team you're looking for. 

It was an all-too-familiar litany that led to this defeat.  The running game was a near non-factor, despite the fact that Arian Foster was running effectively when he actually got the ball.  For reasons that elude those of us not receiving signals directly from outer space, he accumulated only 13 carries in a game that was close for quite a while longer than the final score indicates.   Then there was the sharp contrast of coaching ####: Saban opening the game with an onside kick, Fulmer opting out of two different fourth-down chances of less than a yard.  And even when Fat Phil tried to throw a wrinkle in, like the attempted reverse in the third quarter, he was undone by the final hallmark of his team: poor preparation.  Botched handoff, fumble, turnover.  You can excuse being out-executed by another team on occasion.  But to routinely display bad tackling technique, poor special-teams coverage, mistakes of inadequate preparation (like the fumble) and mental errors (the first rule of kick return play is to check against the onside kick) suggests a team with severe coaching deficiencies.  The once-ferocious Large Orange One

is starting to look more like the Great Pumpkin.

Unfortunately, Tennessee has the look of a team that has missed its window.  Florida faded a bit under Ron Zook, but UT was unable to assert itself over Georgia and missed its chance.  Now the Gators have found their feet under Meyer and appear poised to dominate the SEC East again.  That might be borderline tolerable, but South Carolina, Kentucky, and even reliable whipping-boy Vanderbilt show the telltale signs of teams on the rise.  On Rocky Top, on the other hand, the compass needle is wandering elsewhere.  The free-fall hasn't begun yet, but it won't be long at this rate.  Unless we find Phil a barstool next to Charlie Weis in the Overrated/Overstuffed Lounge,  future direction is likely to be nothing but southward.

I think Philip Fulmer's seat finally has to be getting a bit warm.  He's been riding the goodwill from 1998 for quite some time, and recent seasons have not been as successful as the Tennessee faithful have come to expect.

You could make a lot of arguments about why he should be nervous - difficulties winning the big games, lack of recent SEC championships, the poor overall record against archrival Florida just to name a few.  But the biggest argument for me is just to take a glance at his team.

The game against Cal was by no means a true blowout; take away the first touchdown (as it should have been, since the fumble was caused by as clear an example of spearing as you could find), and it was a one-touchdown game.  Add in the question of whether the dynamics of the game would have been affected by taking that touchdown away (and the possibility of Tennessee actually scoring first), and you have what might really be quite an even contest.  For the most part, the personnel on both sides seemed pretty evenly matched (although with Coker out, Tennessee didn't seem to have any playmakers with quite the electricity that Jackson and Best bring to the table).  But look at how they played, specifically on defense and special teams.  Consistently out of position on ST, consistently missing tackles on defense - is there any more damning indictment of a coaching staff than poor performance of things as fundamental as tackling?

I'm not even touching on the issue of play-calling (also pretty atrocious), which is probably handled more by the offensive coordinator and is also affected by which of his reads Ainge chose to target.  But for me the specific complaint is that the things a head coach can do the most to eliminate - poor fundamentals, dumb penalties and mistakes, poor positioning - are exactly the things that have been consistently wrong at Tennessee for the last few years.  And the decision to kick to Jackson is hard to figure as anything but spectacular hubris or unforgivable cluelessness.

Beating Florida is a salve for any UT coach's woes, and winning the SEC title after an opening hiccup would erase all bad feelings, but I don't see either happening.  Without these gold stars on his report card, I think Fulmer's going to be feeling the heat.  With a couple of pretty tough games in the next two weeks (Southern Miss is a trap game if I ever saw one, sandwiched between a tough loss and a game against the Gators), Fat Phil could be looking at a much tougher situation than just having used up all of his Weight Watchers points for the week.