ThirdAndChavis has been correcting Tennessee fans since somebody gave him a modem.
Nobody appointed him.
Nobody needed to.
He found the job on his own.
ThirdAndChavis
Hometown: Ooltewah, Tennessee
Occupation: Independent insurance claims adjuster
Board role: Unelected Board senior elder
Specialties: Clock management, leverage, roster math, NetJet rumors and correcting data points nobody made
Signature Board move: Arriving on page six to explain what the first five pages failed to understand
A normal Tennessee Message Boarder says, “I think.”
ThirdAndChavis starts with, “What people need to understand…”
Then you are going to understand it, whether you asked or not.
Where the Name Came From
ThirdAndChavis got the name from a piece of Tennessee football history that still makes a certain age group start yelling at the television.
Back in the Fulmer years, third-and-long could get weird. John Chavis would back the secondary off so far that the defensive backs vanished from the widescreen.
The idea was simple: keep everything in front of you.
The problem was that sometimes the first-down marker was in front of you too.
Third-and-16. Third-and-18. Third-and-19. Catch underneath. Run to the sticks. First down.
Eventually somebody got pissed off enough to start keeping a spreadsheet.
Third and Chavis? You decide.
The username pretty much wrote itself.
The Claim Remains Open
His day job explains a lot.
ThirdAndChavis works a football argument like disputed storm damage. Dates. Photos. Prior statements. And a very specific question about why you are now claiming you never called the quarterback soft.
If he was right, he has documentation.
If he was wrong, you misunderstood what he was saying.
If you find the old post where he said the exact opposite, you have taken it out of context.
He has never lost an argument.
Several have simply been closed without payment.
Areas of Expertise
During a coaching search, he becomes FlightAware with a login problem.
During recruiting season, he can read a seventeen-year-old’s intentions from a photograph outside a steakhouse.
On Saturday, he is the coordinator. Which side of the ball does not matter.
By Sunday morning, he remembers opposing the bad decision from the beginning.
Board Feuds & Rivals
ThirdAndChavis has been on the Board long enough that some of his arguments have outlived assistant coaches.
His longest-running feud is with Cromptons3rdRead, who once told him he “didn’t understand defensive leverage” during a 2014 thread that started about nickel coverage and somehow ended with both men arguing over whether Tennessee had ever properly used the boundary.
Neither has forgotten it.
Cromptons3rdRead still drops “leverage” into threads when he wants to wake him up.
Then there is OldBullsGapVol, who spent most of one recruiting cycle insisting that unofficial forty times were “basically propaganda.” ThirdAndChavis responded with combine splits, high-school track results and three paragraphs about hand timing.
That argument is believed to be dormant.
Nobody considers it over.
MaryvilleVol is less a rival than a recurring procedural problem. He has learned that the quickest way to summon ThirdAndChavis is to begin a post with:
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but…
Or, more dangerously:
White linebackers are just too damn slow for SEC football.
ThirdAndChavis usually has the numbers in front of him.
Sometimes from 2009.
He and MaryvilleVol have been fighting variations of this argument for years. Forty times. Shuttle times. Colton Jumper. Recruiting rankings. Whether “instincts” is just something announcers say about white linebackers because nobody wants to discuss their forty.
Neither man has convinced the other of anything.
This has not reduced the number of posts.
That’s the thing about Board feuds. Nobody wins. Nobody leaves.
They just meet again in a different thread.
Selected Work
I’m not saying the staff has lost the room. I’m saying people who know what a room looks like are asking questions.
ThirdAndChavis, coaching-search file
Some of you are confusing a plane being in the air with a plane having a destination.
ThirdAndChavis, aviation enthusiast
You cannot evaluate quarterback play from the television copy. Anyway, his feet are a mess.
ThirdAndChavis, quarterback camping
You are not qualified to evaluate the quarterback from television.
He is.
Peer Review
He once corrected my recollection of a game I attended.
OrangeBritches
I disagree with him plenty. I just search my old posts first.
CheckerboardCharlie
ThirdAndChavis Reviews Loser With Socks
I don’t read that site. People send it to me. Usually because something is wrong.
ThirdAndChavis
He has checked LWS every morning for years. We saw the browser history. You do not need to.
That counts as five stars around here.
Final Evaluation
ThirdAndChavis has outlasted coaches, quarterbacks, athletic directors, server migrations and several solemn declarations that he was finally done with the place.
He was never done.
Somebody else was wrong.
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