No-loss November? Vols plan to win out

Tennessee isn't getting rid of the traditional one-at-a-time approach.

It is looking for a more efficient way to pile up wins, though.

For all the excitement the Vols have generated with a couple lopsided victories and the goodwill Lane Kiffin has created by hanging tough with a couple top-ranked teams, there's still one glaring hole on the resume. The UT coach still doesn't have his first winning streak heading into the last month of the season, although he could change that Saturday night (TV: ESPNU, 7 p.m.) against cross-state rival Memphis.

"As far as what I said about how many we're going to win, I don't know, and I didn't know at the beginning," Kiffin said. "All we do is take it one week at a time, one day at a time and develop our guys.

"Hopefully we'll be really strong here at the end of the season, which was our plan all along by playing so many guys early, especially the young guys. They'd be developed so by the time we get to right now in crucial games they're not making the same rookie mistakes they were early in the year."

Those errors have largely kept the Vols (4-4, 2-3 SEC), from stringing together any sort of consistency, but they seem to have found some heading into Homecoming with the Tigers (2-6, 1-4 Conference USA).

The offense has taken off behind steady running from Montario Hardesty and the emergence of quarterback Jonathan Crompton. An injury-plagued defense has buckled down and allowed just one touchdown in the last three games.

And though the special-teams unit continues to struggle and helped keep the Vols from posting back-to-back wins for the first time this year at Alabama, UT should be able to make up for it down the stretch. A team without even a two-game run at this point could conceivably rattle off five in a row to close the season, and it has every expectation it will.

"It's a good thing, because obviously we want to go undefeated in November," Crompton said. "That's the goal of every team because that's the hard stretch, that's where what you did in the summer and in camp really pays off, all the conditioning and all the extra work you came in and did.

"We are really taking pride in it, and we kind of almost count South Carolina in it because it was the day before November. We're trying to go in undefeated because if we finish 8-4 we've accomplished a lot, especially losing two close ones to No. 1 teams in the country."

Those losses to the Crimson Tide and at Florida clearly sting, though it's the losses to UCLA and Auburn that might eventually be the most painful considering where UT might have wound up in the postseason with a couple more wins.

Either way, the Vols aren't looking back with any regrets, and Kiffin certainly isn't second-guessing his decisions - particularly with so much left for which to play.

"That's this system," Kiffin said. "If you're going to play that many freshmen early on and new guys, you're going to take your lumps. You're not going to play as well as maybe you would if you just played the veterans. But that's for a reason, now that you see these injuries and see these guys go down. We have guys that have played, instead of all of a sudden having to take guys (off the bench) and get them ready.

"This always helps you. It always has and hopefully it will help us down the line in this stretch run because so many guys have played for us and our young guys, hopefully our freshmen don't feel like freshmen."

There's still one thing they haven't experienced at UT, though. The young Vols have won some big games, just not consecutively.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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