Tennessee-Alabama: Win-Win Situation for Vols

For the second time this season, Tennessee will tackle a top-ranked opponent when it travels to Alabama Saturday to face Nick Saban's Crimson Tide (3:30 p.m., CBS).

For the second time this season, Vols coach Lane Kiffin will have an opportunity to silence his critics by knocking off a superior foe.

In September, the first-year head coach took his team to The Swamp, where the Vols turned in a valiant, but losing, effort against Urban Meyer's No. 1 Florida Gators, 23-13.

Alabama, meanwhile, vaulted to the top of the Associated Press Top 25 in the aftermath of its 20-6 win over South Carolina last weekend. That sets the stage for the first Tennessee-Alabama game with either team topping the rankings since 1980, when No. 1 Alabama defeated the Vols 27-0 in Knoxville.

The matter of which team is under pressure to win and which has nothing to lose is over-analyzed to the point of becoming cliché. But let there be no mistake: Tennessee has much more to gain than to lose on Saturday.

Earning a postseason bowl berth is an obvious goal. Avoiding a three-game losing streak to the Tide for the first time since 1992 would be nice. But for the Vols and their head coach, the eye is on the future.

With two SEC losses already this season, even believers in divine sports miracles have to concede that the Vols aren't in play for an SEC division crown. Florida would have to lose three of their last four conference games—against Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Georgia, and South Carolina—for that to happen.

So each of the games on the remaining 2009 docket are merely small battles in the larger war. Including this weekend's trip to Tuscaloosa.

With one Top 10 recruiting class under their belts and another apparently in the works for next February, Kiffin & Co. are chipping away at the talent deficit that had developed in Knoxville over the past several years. A monumental beat-down at Bryant-Denny Stadium Saturday afternoon—perhaps on the scale of the Vols' last game here, a 41-17 loss to the Tide in 2007—might hinder recruiting efforts.

But in a game the Vols are expected to lose (and big), in a season where they're on the outside looking in at the SEC championship race, that's about the extent of the "Things We Have To Lose" list on this "Third Saturday of October That's Actually the Fourth."

It seems unlikely that the Vols will lose on the same scale as that 2007 meltdown on a withering day in T-Town. Or even on the same scale of last year's 29-9 whooping at Neyland Stadium.

Alabama fans are saying, "We've been here before." And they're referring to the similarities between Tennessee this year and last: A tough defense and an average offense that features talented running backs, and little else.

But Tennessee fans are also saying, "We've been here before." They're referring to their September trip to Gainsville, where the Vols kept a highly favored, top-ranked team in check before ultimately coming up short.

In the aftermath of that loss, Gator fans mocked Vols fans for latching onto "moral victories," and none other than Meyer himself accused Tennessee of not playing to win.

But with several minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, Tennessee found itself with the ball on the Florida side of the field, trailing 23-13. Had the Vols scored a touchdown, or even converted a first down to get into field goal range, the price of poker would've gone up substantially in The Swamp for the final few minutes of that game.

Coming into this weekend's game, the Vols aren't 29-point underdogs, but the odds-layers aren't giving them much of a chance. The line favors Alabama by 17. And the nation's sportswriters favor the Tide as the best team in the country.

Sound familiar? Tennessee has been here before.

With one notable exception. Something happened between Meyer's and Kiffin's postgame verbal sparring last month and last week's off-week: The emergence of a passing game in Knoxville. In what appeared to be nothing short of miraculous, Kiffin and brother-in-law David Reaves (Tennessee's quarterbacks coach) found a way to coax Jonathan Crompton out of his shell. After throwing a pair of touchdowns in a furious fourth quarter rally against Auburn, the fifth-year senior threw for 310 yards and four scores against Georgia two weeks ago.

Alabama fans will be quick to point out—and rightly so—that Georgia's defense has played poorly enough this season to allow an average quarterback to look good, while the Tide's defense has made a habit of making good quarterbacks look average.

But in the reckoning of what's to lose and what's to gain, Tennessee doesn't necessarily have to win on the scoreboard. They just have to make Saban uncomfortable in the fourth quarter.

It worked before. In the aftermath of the Florida game, opportunistic sportswriters who had spent the previous week rehashing Kiffin's anti-Gator comments and preparing their readers for the pending bloodbath at Florida Field were suddenly saying that Monte Kiffin had drawn up a blueprint for how to slow down the Tim Tebow attack. They stopped just short of proclaiming that Kiffin is Meyer's kryptonite.

You got the feeling that, at sports desks across the nation, prognosticators were secretly betting on how long it would be before Meyer realized his "predicament" and bolted for Notre Dame.

Which is a hyperbolic way of saying that, in the aftermath of Tennessee's loss to Florida, the losing coach got all the press, while the fact that the Gators remained in the driver's seat for the national championship was a sidebar. Because Kiffin beat expectations.

As a three-score underdog, the expectations aren't very high for Tennessee again on Saturday. There isn't as much to gain in beating 'Bama or even playing them close as there was against the Gators; the state of Alabama isn't as important to the Vols' recruiting efforts as the state of Florida.

The Vols and the Tide are, however, competing for several of the same blue-chip prospects. On paper, Tennessee doesn't have the horses to hang with Alabama. The Tide has the most talented team in college football. They are—dare I say it?—better coached than Florida.

But there is the X-factor. That quarterback who looked good against Georgia. If I were a Rammer Jammer-singing Alabama fan, I might not be too concerned about Crompton's ability. But I might not be totally confident, either. If the Georgia performance is proven not to be a fluke, the team with everything to gain might gain more than just about anybody expects: An upset win that would undoubtedly be one of the biggest in Tennessee history.

Likely? Not really. But here's another cliché to close:

Stranger things have happened.