All posts tagged College Football

We are happy to feature a guest post from Jennifer Doyle at Playgroups are No Place for Children.

Now I realize that many of you don’t live in Knoxville. As most southerners do, we take our football seriously here in Knoxville where we worship at the alter of the University of Tennessee Volunteers. As much as we love our football team, we’re no fools. This isn’t going to be their year to win the SEC Championship, let alone the NCAA Championship. (And really, we know that next year probably won’t be their year either and frankly, we don’t hold much hope for the next several seasons.) We love them anyway and we love talking about them.

Vol football makes up the majority of our sports programming in the fall. They’re all that’s talked about on TV, local sports talk radio, the newspaper, and blogs from August until January. That’s a lot of time to fill and with a team that is less than spectacular, even the little of things related to the Vols will make the news. That, and the not so little things. Enter: Coach Derek Dooley’s orange pants.

I had to take a double take on the Vols season opener against Montana on September 3rd. With my mouth full of Arroz Con Pollo (what? Doesn’t everyone eat homemade Cuban food to watch college football?), I thought I saw Derek Dooley standing on the sidelines wearing what looked to me like orange pants. Upon second look, yes, he was indeed wearing orange pants.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was mesmerized? puzzled? shocked? by Coach Dooley’s fashion choice. A Facebook page devoted to his fancy pants has well over 25,000 fans. These pants are a hot topic here in Knoxville, aside from the football purists who insist that the news coverage of his pants when we could be talking about how to get their defense to, you know, defend, has gone on long enough. The thing is, we haven’t stopped talking about them because he keeps wearing them, each week.

Some fans were convinced that the orange pants held magical powers after the Vols won their first two games. That all went out the window when Florida beat the Vols on September 17th for the seventh straight year.

Rumors flew after the first sighting of the orange pants regarding their cost. One such number that was thrown around was that these custom tailored pants cost was the very precise, $1,423.32. Made of woven wool from England and dyed three times to get just the right shade of orange, these pants were made by a local retailer, John H. Daniel Clothing. Metropulse.com published a screencap of a video released by UT regarding the making of these pants, showing the what appeared to be that price on an invoice.

This price has has since been refuted by the tailor and the Knoxville News Sentinel sports editor.

Fans of the Tennessee Vols will soon be able to get their very own orange pants off the rack to show their team spirit, just in time for Halloween costume season.

Jennifer Doyle is a freelance writer living in Knoxville, TN. She’s a huge fan the UT Vols, but she’s is easily distracted during games by all the snacks. She runs a local website, Family Friendly Knoxville, is the Editorial Director of Story Bleed Magazine, and a writer for Babble.com. In her abundant spare time, she chronicles her life on her personal blog, Playgroups are No Place for Children.