Ok, are you ready for the absolute stupidest article about football that you could ever read? Maybe it's the stupidest article about anything ever written, but that can be left up to you. Before going any further, feel free to read through the article in question.

Ok, a little prefacing. Tennessee's football program has been down for the past few years, both on and off the field. Just a quick summary:

-Franklin County, Tennessee native that led the school to the national championship was unceremoniously run out of his job after the 2008 season.

-The sting of running off a "local legend" was soothed by hiring the epitome of an "outsider", a young and brash California boy.

-The new guy proved to possess more gum-flapping and controversy-creating skills than coaching ones. His first season ends with mediocre results, to put it generously.

-A flurry of off-field problems plague the team. Problems with grades, guns and such become about as common as wins.

-New coach quickly jumps ship when given a chance to return to California and lead another dirty program.

-A new new coach is hired...from Louisiana Tech. At least he has a good name for SEC football.

-Throughout all of this, the SEC has gone from being probably the best conference in the nation for college football to clearly the best. Three different teams in the league have won the last 4 national championships and UT has not even been in the proximity of national championship discussions.

So, back to the present and this asinine article. The author blindly dives into the notion that fans of college football need to read the newspaper in order to form an emotional attachment to their teams. This might be an effective path if you're just trying to reach the least interested fans. However, those sort of people probably aren't the ones reading something like Go Vols Xtra on August 22.

One doesn't have to be a UT fan to acknowledge that UT has a passionate fan base that will gladly fill up Neyland Stadium every time the team takes the field. They already know where their program is and where they want it to be. Furthermore, they are probably football-savvy enough to know that simply hating your opponents, rivals and detractors does not really amount to very much anywhere, much less in the most competitive league in the nation.

At first, it seems like maybe the author is simply trying to remind the reader that things can change and its best to always look forward because, just as Alabama has proven over the past few years, just because a program is down doesn't mean it has to stay there. But then he starts dredging the river of past regrets and failures for whatever he can find. Lane Kiffin? Yes, absolutely hate him. Alabama? Sure. Florida? Them too.

Who else? Charles Woodson? Uh, yeah, go ahead and hate him too because he won an individual award over a UT player when most of the current UT players were barely old enough to hold a football. Kansas State? They must be hated because a player from the state of Kansas chose to transfer there from UT after the most recent coaching change.

And for the kicker...hate all of North Carolina's opponents this year. Not because one of those opponents is an SEC team (LSU), but because UT bought themselves out of a game against UNC each of the next two seasons. The hope is that UNC will turn out to be really great and UT can feel good about themselves for not having to play a tough team next season. Never mind the fact that they can't wiggle out of their usual conference games against the likes of Alabama, Florida and Georgia. But yeah, its better to wish success for North Carolina (by hating their opponents) than think about that other stuff.

Just in case you need a different team to hate for each day of the week, throw in Bowling Green and Duke. Seriously? The only reason a UT fan should even know these teams exist is if they're looking for an easy non-conference game. The reason for hating these teams is because their current head coaches' previous gigs were as UT assistants. How dare they? Don't they know that the pinnacle of coaching is to be an assistant at UT, where they can serve under 3 different head coaches in 3 years and have articles like this written by local newspaper guys? Poor Duke must really feel bad knowing that UT fans should hate them for two reasons now (they play UNC).

As difficult as it seems, this article almost makes you feel bad for UT. Much of what is said is true, but this article was written right in the middle of Fall practice. Surely there are better things that could have been researched and put into words. The fans deserve better. This team might be their biggest "escape" from "real" life and they shouldn't have their heads filled with ideas of who to hate. They need to support their team and look forward, even if all they have to look forward to is another season of SEC mediocrity. The comments at the bottom of article indicate that most of the UT fans that read the article weren't affected by it, at least not in the way it intended.

Maybe there's actually signs of life on ol' Rocky Top after all.