A crowd of 96,874 gathered at Neyland Stadium on Oct. 13, 1990, for Tennessee’s football game against Florida and was treated to essentially two different games in one setting that Saturday evening.
A closely contested affair played out during the opening half. Everything changed, though, when UT All-American Dale Carter took the second-half kickoff 91 yards for a touchdown, igniting a 38-point onslaught. In short order, the fans went from sweating the outcome to savoring a 45-3 rout.
They were doing some very loud savoring at the game’s end. They all stayed to enjoy every last second. Well, it sounded like they all were still there as I started my walk across the field toward Florida’s locker room. Their collective roar came down from above out of the darkness like rolling thunder. Their sound filled my ears and stirred my blood. How else to explain the hairs on my arm suddenly shooting straight up like little soldiers standing at attention.
I stopped in my tracks for a few moments and absorbed the experience. It was the flipside of my first impression almost exactly two years earlier, when I was in the stadium on my official recruiting visit (football vernacular for my job interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel) for a game against Washington State. The Vols were neck deep in a six-game losing streak and large sections of the upper deck were empty. The place looked and felt more like a mausoleum than a madhouse.
Amazing what a difference some winning made just two years later. So, this is what everyone was talking about, I thought, as the soldiers stood their post.
The echo has come back around to me several times since then to remind of the powerful synergy possible between a stadium filled with this fan base and its football team. In 1998, the press box was swaying from the response to an overtime victory over Florida, which was vital to the Vols’ national championship run. David Grim, who served as the public address announcer inside the press box, remembered being “terrified” by the moving experience.
“It was from the noise, it had to be,” Grim said. “It was like an earthquake. I thought that the press box was coming off (the stadium). I’ve never felt anything like that.”
Vols safety Fred White, who said the game still was giving him chills when I interviewed him in 2018, spoke of the fans’ effect in supernatural terms.
“Every ounce of yourself went into that game,” he told me. “They made us play outside of ourselves. My teammates and I have talked about that for years. I didn’t get tired. The crowd energized me. After the game, I was dead tired.”
He summed up the experience by concluding: “I felt like we all won that game together.”
The effect White described was something to which Josh Heupel could relate. After the Vols and a crowd of 101,915 collaborated on a 24-17 victory over Alabama earlier this month, Tennessee’s coach lingered with the fans who swarmed the field afterward to celebrate. He joined them in having a victory cigar and handed out high fives. While neither the game nor the celebration was as raucous as Tennessee’s 52-49 victory on the Crimson Tide’s previous visit in 2022, Heupel savored the moment just the same. “This is college football absolutely as good as it gets.”
Later, when back in character during his postgame media interview, the coach referred to what he had just seen and felt as “the Neyland Effect.” Sounded like he would’ve loved to hand out thousands upon thousands of game balls, too.
“Our fans were elite, elite performance from them all night,” Heupel said. “I appreciate them hanging in there with us on the offensive side of the football when we were struggling.”
Probably wasn’t a coincidence that defensive lineman prospect Tyson Bacon committed to Tennessee that night, informing Heupel of his decision in the locker room afterward. Bacon mentioned the atmosphere and how great it was.
While winning in general does wonders for amplifying the crowd, rivalry games especially serve the purpose. The Alabama victory was preceded by a 23-17 overtime triumph over Florida that unfolded in similar fashion. Under Heupel, Tennessee has four consecutive home victories combined versus the Crimson Tide and Gators. In the 16 years before he arrived, five different coaches combined for a 2-30 record against those two rivals.
“Those are two big games, historically, our fan base, what it means to them, you know what I mean,” Heupel said. “. . . You know the last two weeks on that field, it’s just really special because of what it took to be on the right side of the scoreboard.”
Even better, he said, was walking off the field following the Alabama victory surrounded by the fans.
During the game, an Alabama radio announcer said “the Neyland Effect” was enhanced by piped-in crowd noise. The claim was repeated by a former Crimson Tide player last week. With rival Kentucky here on Saturday night, Heupel, during the off week, urged the fans to respond accordingly.
“Neyland doesn’t need anything fake piped into the stadium for that to be the loudest place in America,” he said. “Hopefully our fans take that personal . . . come back and be louder than ever.”
The coach, during his media session on Monday, doubled down on the sentiment, encouraging the fans to be “a huge part of the game.” The team will be wearing the “Dark Mode” uniforms for the game.
It’s all for Effect.
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Dan Fleser is a 1980 graduate of the University of Missouri, who has covered University of Tennessee athletics since 1988. He is a member of the Tennessee Sportswriters, U.S Basketball Writers and Greater Knoxville Sports Halls of Fame. He can be reached at danfleser3@gmail.com.