“It only hits you when it hits you.”

Jesus, this is incoherent.

However, there is one mistake that Dooley looks back on and admits it was the biggest one he made during his tenure in Knoxville.

““There’s an old saying, ‘Don’t let the shit creep in,’” Dooley said. “Shit can start creeping in, and you’re not really paying attention to it, you wake up one day, and you’ve got a bucket full. I look back, I probably wasn’t as hard on them. I made excuses for them, because they’re young, let’s work with them and help them. Compound that with, we had injuries. All that is sort of a firestorm brewing. It only hits you when it hits you (which was against Kentucky).”

Evidently, this is supposed to mean SOD recognized that his team wasn’t mentally prepared to play a game against Kentucky that it wound up losing.

“This is, 100 percent, my worst mistake, and I was the sole reason for that loss. It only hits you when it hits you, and when I walked out there in pregame, we’d just had an emotional win over Vandy, and everybody thought we were getting back to a bowl, can win seven, the whole deal. In pregame, I knew it wasn’t right. I could feel it. It was the worst, most surreal feeling in me. I’ll never forget it.

“Watching our team, I could see it. Everything I had done since the offseason, making excuses, looking the other way, brushing aside, we need these guys, it kind of all came to a head. It was a terrible, terrible loss. … Our team wasn’t ready to play mentally and emotionally, and that was my fault.”

You just had an emotional win over Vanderbilt, for goodness sake?  Dude, the shit was deeper than you comprehend.

How in the world did Tennessee hire this guy?