Nowledge is gud.

SOD sounds like a broken record sometimes.  Care to guess what he’s talking about here?

“I was surprised at the end,’’ Dooley said. “I think that was something where a lot of the newness, it reared its ugly head and so we’ve worked through it and we’re having a good semester and that’s what matters is how you respond to it.’’

Nah, it’s not shower hygiene.  It’s the football program’s academic record, which is astonishingly bad, even by football factory standards.  Check these tidbits out:

           * 30 players were on academic probation from the fall semester, 24 on scholarship. Of the 24, nine were starters and two others did not participate in the spring for academic reasons: Cory Miller and Jerquari Schofield. Another, Arthur Jeffery, has left the program. Miller is likely to return, Schofield is not, a source said.

            * Nine scholarship players were on the 3.0 honor roll in the fall and 13 had a cumulative GPA above a 3.0.

            * The 1.9 GPA among scholarship players was considerably less than in the fall of 2010 (2.37), 2009 (2.31) and 2008 (2.18).

            * Of the 13 seniors-to-be, 10 had a 2.0 GPA or better. Of the 31 juniors-to-be, nine had a GPA of 2.0 or better and seven earned six or fewer hours. Of the 25 in the 2011 recruiting class, 15 had a 2.0 or better and four failed to earn more than six hours.

That’s pretty staggering.  And before you jump on Dooley for being dumb enough to carry six walk-ons who are on academic probation, note that the group as a whole pulled the team’s GPA last fall up from a 1.9 to a 2.06.  At Tennessee.

You’re a head coach at a program which presumably has resources galore to throw at keeping student-athletes academically eligible.  How do you miss this?

It’s remarkable that he’s still got the job.  It’s even more remarkable that if he can get to a bowl game this year, it’ll probably be enough to get him another year at UT.