Three-point stance: Vols on the rise

Today’s edition talks about the Vols' finish to their season, star players sitting out bowl games and Christian Hackenberg's career at Penn State.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. The Tennessee Volunteers will win the SEC East next season. It has to happen, right? Many Vols fans were upset when I labeled the program, one of the top 10 money-makers in college football, as sick last year because they should have won the SEC East this year and didn’t come close. Okay, maybe they came close, but you get the point. While the Vols gave Oklahoma and Alabama all they could handle, two of the four playoff teams, and probably should have held onto both leads, they still had four losses and couldn’t win one of the worst divisions in Power Five football.

But remember where the expectations to win came from in the first place. After a 6-6 season in 2014, they thumped Iowa in the TaxSlayer Bowl and, coupled with great recruiting, many including myself deemed them SEC East champs in the making. This was their year right?

Well, actually many thought 2016 was always the year the Vols would shine as head coach Butch Jones continues to finish his own roster of players. And now, after destroying another Big Ten team in Northwestern in the Outback Bowl, Tennessee will be favored to win the division next year. Georgia is in transition, Mizzou and South Carolina have become awful and also have new coaches, Kentucky continues to regress and Vanderbilt has one of the worst offenses in the country. That leaves a Florida team without a solution at quarterback and that lost three straight to finish the season including a 41-7 thumping by Michigan in the Citrus Bowl.

The Vols have a really good chance to make this program healthy again next season, but they’ll need to win the SEC East and more than 9 games in my opinion. And, even though it sounds like déjà vu, I think it happens in 2016.

After watching Notre Dame star linebacker Jaylon Smith suffer a “significant knee injury” in what should have been his last college football game against Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, I began to wonder –- when will some of the big-time, sure thing NFL first-rounders start skipping meaningless bowl games to avoid such injuries? Notice the question does not have an “if”, because it’s only a matter of time.

How can I say that a New Year’s Day Bowl Game is meaningless? With the current college football playoff system, two big games are what matter in the scope of a national title and players like Smith really have nothing to gain. While I thought projections of Smith in the top 5 of the 2016 NFL Draft were a bit high, that doesn’t mean there weren’t a few NFL teams that thought differently. In fact, in five of the last 10 drafts, the top linebacker went in the top five and if the need is there, someone could have pounced on Smith that high or traded up to get him.

But even if he went in the top 10, we’re talking about serious millions. At least $12 million or so. Now, if Smith leaves school and slides to the 20-30 range, his contract will be worth anywhere from $8.5 to $7 million. That’s still a ton of dough no doubt, but remember that the guaranteed money in the NFL gets lower and lower as you fall in the first round. And, God forbid, let’s say it was a career-threatening injury or something that slid him down into the third or fourth round, then we’re talking about a ridiculous amount of money lost.

Yes, players can insure themselves, as Smith has, against injury, but those policies pay much less than what they would have made at the top of the draft. Don’t get me wrong -- I’m against players sitting out bowl games to avoid injury because it’s a very slippery slope, a disservice to their teammates and it reeks of selfishness. But what if it were you? What if you had a choice between playing in a New Year’s Bowl as an amateur athlete versus avoiding any chance of injury that could mess up life-altering money? After watching Smith get carted off the field, would you think twice if you were Leonard Fournette, Myles Garrett, Cameron Robinson or fellow linebacker Raekwon McMillan, who saw it in person? I’ll be honest, I might think about it.

A tremendous debt of gratitude is owed to quarterback Christian Hackenberg by Penn State fans despite his regression since his freshman year. Hackenberg, a five-star prospect with offers from 30+ schools, could have bailed on Penn State after the historic sanctions were handed down by the NCAA following the Jerry Sandusky scandal under Joe Paterno back in 2012. He could have landed almost any place, else but decided to stick with Penn State in the face of what appeared to be, at the time, the closest thing to the death penalty since SMU.

Yes, it’s interesting he didn’t thank current head coach James Franklin but did thank former coach Bill O’Brien as well as other coaches and even the video director, but that’s not the focal point for me, as juicy as that is. What’s important here is a kid who committed to a school that needed him to keep his word more than any other recruit in recent history.

As the five star quarterback in that class, he was the one everyone paid attention to and his commitment to the Nittany Lions helped the program through some tough times. I may not be as high on Hackenberg the NFL Draft prospect as I was a couple of years ago, but as a leader and stand-up guy, he’s a great example for other recruits.