Tennessee Volunteers' 1998 National Championship: Part I

The Vols didn't play perfectly by any means, but they played well enough to win 30-29, capturing their first SEC Championship since 1990 and getting Peyton Manning his ring.

Even though Tennessee hadn't beaten Florida, they had the rings.  And I think mentally, that changed some of the landscape.  The Vols, not the Gators, would be entering the 1998 season as the defending SEC Champions.  That gave Tennessee confidence, and that confidence made a difference.

That was what we'd gained.  From there, the Vols did some losing.

First, Peyton Manning lost the Heisman Trophy.  Then, No. 1 Michigan held off Washington State in the Rose Bowl, eliminating Tennessee's chances to win the National Championship if they had beaten No. 2 Nebraska. 

Then, Nebraska did some beating of their own.

The Cornhuskers put their evil inside the Vols to the tune of 42-17.  Witnessing the loss of a great Tennessee team and a great Tennessee player like Manning, beaten down in the twilight of the season and his career, was incredibly disheartening even without the National Championship on the line.  The Vols got physically whipped in a way that I haven't seen before or since.

But from that ashes of that Orange Bowl loss came lessons.  Get stronger.  Get tougher.  Get meaner.  Every time one of my teams takes a real beating, I always think back to this game.  Because the next year, it turned into the best thing that ever happened to Tennessee Football.

The rest of what made 1998 so special is that you never saw it coming.

Despite the confidence and the rings, the Nebraska beatdown put a swift and sudden end to the Manning Era.  And he wasn't the only one who was leaving.

The Vols lost Manning, WR Marcus Nash, DEs Leonard Little and Jonathan Brown, and DB Terry Fair to the NFL.  Names who had been mainstays in the Vol attack for several years were now gone, and their replacements were far from sure things.  Manning's name was the biggest and brightest, but the losses on the whole on both sides of the ball left doubt.

The assumption, in Knoxville and everywhere, was that Tennessee had its chance with Manning, won one SEC title after backdooring their way into Atlanta, and now it was back to the pack while Florida continued to assert itself.  And on paper, it was hard to argue.

You knew about Jamal Lewis, but with Tee Martin having never started a game and no proven No. 1 receiver, there were questions about the offense.  And outside of a linebacking corps that would ultimately live up to its billing, the defense was packed with even bigger issues.

10 years ago in late June, we didn't know what we were going to see when the Vols hit the field in September, but we knew it would be something new.

And something new is exactly what we got.

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