Is Florida ultimately responsible for the utter demise of Tennessee football???

No

I will lol if Tennessee beats Florida today.

Of course you will, cause you secretly like UF. You have a little crush...awww, that's cute

You are overstating the relevance of UF. The volunteers will be back

Only thing Florida is responsible for is losing to Miami. Weak arse program.

I don't think so. UT won a lot while still getting beat by UF.

I really think the 2001 SECCG was the beginning of the end of that UT run. They were bound for a NCG date. Walking around with orange roses. Up 17-7 or something at halftime. And just got mauled from there. From afar, the program never seemed the same after that. Yes I know they won the east after that but it just seemed that they lost more than a game that day.

No.

Bama got back to hardcore cheating, and UGA and Carolina got better,not allowing us to take recruits from those areas.

I'm not sure why you'd point to a program also in major decline as the reason?

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I will lol if Tennessee beats Florida today.

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And UT fans will quickly proclaim rockey top is back! (for real this time!!)

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Is Florida ultimately responsible for the utter demise of Tennessee football???

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No.

More than any single factor, the demise of Tenn football can be traced back to more egalitarian media deals and greater media exposure for all programs.

Back in the old days, back before NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, there were only a few college games on each week. Helmet teams got the best shots at these spots, which became a re-enforcement mechanism for the position of these teams in the pecking order via recruiting. Tennessee benefitted from this greatly to stay football royalty year-after-year.

Even after the court case, there were only a few distribution platforms for college football. In the 90's even ESPN2 wasn't an overflow station, it was originally created to be a youth football station. You had NBC, CBS, ABC, ESPN and that was basically it. Elite teams still had a degree of insulation due to this situation.

Then in the 2000's exposure boomed. We got ESPN2 as spillover, ESPN U, Fox Sports, and now conference networks. Almost every Big 5 program gets almost all their games on TV, and the exposure advantage for being a helmet team was almost completely lost (except Texas with its LHN, but that is a very unique scenario Tenn can't copy).

This shift in exposure has changed the game to a point where local talent really matters (because talent no longer HAS TO go to a tOSU or Tenn to get seen on TV). If you don't have local talent, you have to sell sexy, like Oregon, which many helmet teams are too proud to do.

In this era Tenn let go of its successful coach, not realizing this shift in the media culture. By losing the coach they lost the little connection to the past that made the program sexy- a winning history. Without tons of local talent or any sex appeal, Tenn's program quickly fell on hard times.

Now Tenn was stuck in this middle ground. They didn't have the sway anymore to hire a sexy coach, the route many helmet teams use to survive in this era. To get back on top they had to beat either sexier teams or teams with much better local talent. To make matters worse Tenn had entitled fans that didn't want to change too much, as they felt as football royalty the world should just continue to bow to them.

What Tenn football needed was a reality check, which it got with Dooley. Now we have Butch who is given MUCH more freedom to modernize the program and get some of the sexy back, because Tenn fans deep down know that the "Oregon of the SEC" route instead of clinging to tradition is their best shot. And so far early results are pretty good.