Mattingly: Opening kickoff a compelling first act

There's nothing like the excitement of the opening kickoff. Is it better to kick or receive?

Gen. Bob Neyland and Bowden Wyatt always wanted to let the other team have the ball first. There are more ways to score on defense than on offense, the reasoning goes. In later years, the team that won the coin toss generally took the ball, unless there was some weather or other field issue involved.

Consider what Russ Bebb wrote about the 1954 season. "Almost unbelievably, Captain Darris McCord won the coin toss in each of the 10 games, and each time Tennessee chose to kick off." That came in a 4-6 campaign, the last for head coach Harvey Robinson before Bowden Wyatt came marching home.

"The conservative approach is fine with the public when the team is winning," Bebb wrote, "but it is bad news for the coach in a losing year."

In recent years, the team that won the toss could defer the option to the second half, upsetting a number of football purists, including our own Haywood Harris, who thought the rules of football had been brought from on high, perhaps by Walter Camp or some other early sage of the game.

There was something to be said, momentum-wise, for a team scoring near the end of the first half to get the ball to start the second half. It gave already over-worked coaches something else to think about and plan for.

Now, with kickoffs set from the 30-yard line, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to receiving the opening kickoff. When given the opportunity to choose to receive, the Vols have done exactly that. Offensive field position rules the day in these otherwise uncertain times.

The most famous opening kickoff came as the Vols lined up to receive in 1928 against Alabama. Gene McEver took it back 98 yards, Tennessee won 15-13, and the Vols were in the football business to stay. Just for the record, Buddy Hackman took the opening kickoff in for a score, this one for 94 yards, the next week against Washington & Lee. Back-to-back opening kickoff returns for scores hasn't happened since.

The second came when Decatur's Gary Moore went the same distance against Auburn in 1979, thus pleasing head coach John Majors. He had been pleading with his team to make something happen early in the game. That, it seemed, was plenty early.

The Vols won the toss in the 1967 and 1968 Alabama games, and immediately marched for scores that set the tone for each game, the Vols winning 24-13 and 10-9, both efforts led by the incomparable Bubba Wyche.

The Vols kicked off in the 1969 Alabama game, forced a punt, and immediately went in for a score, just to prove it could happen the other way, too.

Then there was the 1983 Alabama game. The Vols kicked off, and Alabama marched steadily and inexorably for the game's first score. That didn't seem to faze the Vols. On the first play from scrimmage, Alan Cockrell hit Lenny Taylor on an innocent-looking hitch route to the right side.

Then came the good part. The young wideout named after the 1950s Baltimore Colts running back (his full name is Lenny Moore Taylor) broke a tackle and zoomed 80 yards for a score. It was 7-7 and ended up 41-34, Tennessee.

Sometimes the opening kickoff works against the team kicking off.

Tennessee kicked off in the 1973 contest, and Wayne Wheeler caught an 80-yard TD pass from Gary Rutledge on the game's first play, going north to south at Legion Field. The Vols recovered for a 21-21 tie going into the fourth quarter, but Alabama won going away, 21-0 in the fourth canto, 42-21 overall.

Twenty-two years later, on the same field, minus the artificial turf, the Vols started on the 20, going south to north, when Peyton Manning hit Joey Kent for another 80-yard score that set the tone for the Vols' first win over Alabama since 1985. The Vols won, 41-14.

When the Vols and Kentucky squared off in 1980, the Vols were in an offensive funk. John Ward asked Bill Anderson about the game, Anderson replying he didn't really know what might happen.

Willie Gault returned the opening kickoff 92 yards for a score, and the Vols won 45-14. Points came in droves that day, much to everyone's surprise.

Just to show it wasn't a fluke, he ran the second half kickoff back for a score the next week, Tennessee 51, Vanderbilt 13. John Ward said, "Willie Gault has run all the way to the State Capitol."

There are those who say the kickoff is merely a way to start the game, but how teams respond to it goes a long way in determining who wins, who loses, and why.

Tom Mattingly is the author of "The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006" (2006), to be published in second edition in June 2009, and "Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years" (1998). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called "The Vol Historian."