Vols fan goes viral during the Sweet 16 game against Kentucky for displaying classic Tennessee fan behavior
A Tennessee Vols fan went viral on Friday night during the broadcast of UT's Sweet 16 matchup against the Kentucky Wildcats for displaying some classic Tennessee fan behavior. If you've been a Vols fan for longer than five years, you're almost certainly familiar with "battered Vol syndrome", which can loosely be described as the feeling […]
A Tennessee Vols fan went viral on Friday night during the broadcast of UT's Sweet 16 matchup against the Kentucky Wildcats for displaying some classic Tennessee fan behavior.
If you've been a Vols fan for longer than five years, you're almost certainly familiar with "battered Vol syndrome", which can loosely be described as the feeling that no matter how good things are going, something bad must be on the way.
That feeling comes from over a decade of terrible luck that constantly robbed Vols fans of great sports moments (for example, 2015 and 2017 losses to Florida, any time the Vols play Purdue in any sport, the 2016 losses to South Carolina and Vanderbilt, the blocked field goal against Alabama in 2009, etc).
A Tennessee fan in Lucas Oil Stadium went full "battered Vol syndrome" on Friday night during the game against Kentucky despite the Vols holding a 19 point lead at the time.
I'm betting that most Tennessee fans can identify with that Vols fan. Even as good as things were going for Tennessee in the first half against the Wildcats, most Vols fans likely had a voice in their head telling them, "Kentucky is going to go on a big run at some point and make this a tight game".
The Vols, however, managed to answer every single time the Wildcats started to build some momentum.
A Felix Okpara dunk followed by an immediate steal and a Zakai Zeigler three-pointer — arguably the biggest sequence of the game — was the first moment in the game where it felt like Tennessee fans could exhale.
The bigger the games get, the more nervous Tennessee fans we're going to see in the crowd — regardless of how big of a lead the Volunteers may happen to have at the time.
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