KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin wants to know how his Volunteers will perform in a game before he sets his starters.
That’s why he’s treating Saturday’s scrimmage exactly like the first game of the year, down to the 12:21 p.m. kickoff and music played over the speakers at Neyland Stadium.
“This will be more important than any that they’ve done. It’s most realistic,” Kiffin said. “They will have no excuses not to perform to the best of their ability, so we’ll figure out where we are as a team, where we are individually.”
Nobody has more to prove in this dress rehearsal than quarterbacks Jonathan Crompton and Nick Stephens.
The pair has taken nearly the same number of snaps and thrown nearly the same number of passes through two and a half weeks of fall practice, and Kiffin said neither has separated himself from the other.
Though he likes the competition, he also would like to have a starter settled.
Kiffin said of naming his starter. “As soon as it shows, it will show.”
The competition has been running far longer than fall camp. Crompton, a senior, and Stephens, a junior, spent all of last season vying for the job. Both made six starts in 2008, posting mediocre passing numbers.
Kiffin doesn’t want the competition to go into Tennessee’s week of preparation before the Sept. 5 opener against Western Kentucky, so he’s likely to pick a starter quickly after digesting the results of Saturday’s scrimmage.
“Personally, I feel like they keep saying how big this scrimmage is on Saturday, and that they’re probably going to make a decision after this Saturday,” Stephens said. “They haven’t said anything like that to me, but that’s what I assume is going to happen.”
It’s the first time Kiffin and the rest of the coaching staff will be completely out of the huddle. They’ll be coaching just as if it’s a game, with half the staff in the press box and the rest on the sideline.
They’ll be calling plays to the quarterback from the sideline, and Kiffin will be looking to see how both quarterbacks can manage the huddle on their own.
kes the smarter decisions.”
There are other positions Kiffin will have his eye on. He’s looking for kickoff and punt returners, and someone to flank All-American safety Eric Berry in the secondary.
Kiffin also said he’s done installing new offensive plays, for now. The coaches counted the other day and discovered they already have 240 pass plays they could call.
“We stopped so there were no excuses for an evaluation. The last thing we want to do is play some kid and there’s a better kid but we didn’t give him a fair shot because we installed stuff at the last second,” he said.
There are a few things Kiffin can’t quite simulate in the scrimmage. He’s invited the Tennessee students to watch but doesn’t expect them to fill the 102,000-seat stadium.
“Everything will be the same except for we’ll be short about 100,000 and we won’t have a band,” he said. “We tried. They have weekends off right now, I guess.”
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