Tennessee Volunteers return To Excellence

We, the undersigned, proud members of the Big Orange Nation which represents people from all walks of life around the world sharing one passion, that being our love of the UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE Football program, present to Head Football Coach Phillip Fulmer this petition voicing our displeasure over the apparent lack of concern regarding the fortunes of the program since the 1998 season which culminated in a National Championship. We, the undersigned are not the big time money donors, who seem to be able to get to speak directly to Coach Fulmer. We feel the only voice we have in the matter to to address Coach Fulmer through this petition.

While we respect your position as Head Coach, we feel that your ostensible failure to recognize a problem with the program has lead to Tennessees failure to capture any viable championship since the 98 season.

All too often our teams have looked inept, undisciplined, uncoordinated and unorganized since 2002, culminating with 2005 being one of the worst offensive seasons in UT history. Our teams uninspired play must be laid at the feet of the Head Coach and you must accept responsibility for the fortunes of your team to the passionate fans that follow them.

We wish it to be known that although we are not coaches, we do recognize the following problems:

-a failure to discipline the players resulting in far too many penalties that stall our offensive drives and extend offensive drives for the opponents;

-a failure to coordinate the offense into one cohesive unit leading to uninspired offensive line play, Receivers who drop passes and the aforementioned penalties that stall drives;

-a failure to teach and organize Special Teams play due to the lack of a permanent, full-time Special Teams coach, choosing instead to "coach by Committee", have various staff members coach the teams.

While you have brought us a National Championship and 2 Southeastern Conference Championships (last one being in 1998), we feel you are oblivious to problems within the program and we sign this petition CHALLENGING you both to recognize the problems and fix them (even if it requires you to change your philosophy regarding how the Offense and Special Teams should be ran).

We feel that even though you are the coach and may not recognize any problem in how you run your program, we are in no way pleased with the results on the field. We place this at the feet of the Head Coach and urge you to take the steps necessary to correct the problems facing the UT program -- for the rest of 2005 and for the future.