All eyes will be on Knoxville next weekend when the Tennessee Vols and Georgia Bulldogs do battle at Neyland Stadium in one of the biggest SEC games in the early part of this 2025 college football season. The game will be on ABC, and ESPN’s College Gameday will be in attendance, marking the popular pregame show’s first trip to Knoxville since 2022.

The game marks a tremendous opportunity for the Vols to take a big step forward as a program, as Georgia is the only major rival that Josh Heupel has yet to beat in his fifth season as the Vols’ head coach.

Naturally, the crowd at Neyland Stadium should be amped at the level of 2022 and 2024 against Alabama, which worked out pretty well for the Vols. But then again, it’s been pretty high in 2021 and 2023 contests against Georgia, and it didn’t go well for Tennessee.

Regardless, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart just gave Tennessee fans a little bit of extra motivation to give the crowd noise a one percent boost going into next Saturday’s clash.

Kirby Smart addresses crowd noise at Neyland Stadium that should give Vol fans extra motivation to scream louder

“We’ll find out, that’s for sure,” Smart said. “You know what I mean? It’s a different demeanor when you go on the road in the SEC, especially when you have not been on the road. Study the stats on that. You ain’t been on the road, and your first road game is in the SEC. We had that a couple years ago at Auburn. It’s always an adventure. We’ve been preparing for that, knowing that all along it’s going to be different when you go up there. You’ve got to be prepared for it. You’ve got to have confidence in your plan. You’ve got to go execute as a unit. It’s not you against 100,000. It’s you against 11-11.”

Of course, in a direct respect, Smart is right that as a player, you’re on the field with 10 teammates and 11 on the other side of the ball staring back at you. And clearly, he’s trying to remind his players to drown out the noise of the stadium and focus on the task at hand.

But it’s also a challenge to Tennessee fans to allow that to happen. There’s no doubt that Tennessee has generated some of the loudest crowd noise ever, and that it’s affected the game directly. Former Alabama players have talked about it being the most challenging place they’ve ever played. Heck, Alabama’s play-by-play voice, Chris Stewart, accused Tennessee of pumping in crowd noise before walking that back.

So, it’ll be incumbent on Vol fans to create an environment on Saturday that rivals the seismic event (literally and metaphorically) that was witnessed on Oct. 15, 2022, against Alabama. Because players are human, and while they can try to focus, it’s hard to function if they can’t hear.

And with the way both teams are playing coming into this game, that could be the edge that finally gives Tennessee the advantage to claim its first win against Georgia since Oct. 1, 2016.

We’ll find out when toe meets leather at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.