Karl82 knew something was up with Sam Pendleton because Pendleton wasn’t hurt. If he were hurt, the mods would have told everybody. They hadn’t.
Therefore, according to Karl, the board mods knew.
Solid intelligence work.
Then the DUI surfaced, along with the reason Pendleton didn’t play. Heupel knew. Glen Elarbee had been with Pendleton but not charged. The suspension had been handled inside the program.
Nobody had briefed Karl82.
This bothered him because Karl had made what he called a “fairly large investment” in Tennessee football: time, tickets, travel, NIL, media coverage and apparel.
Apparel.
Buy enough orange shit and apparently the athletic department owes you an incident report.
“I think we deserve to know.”
So Karl did the honorable thing and polled REDACTED.
Do fans have a right to know when a Tennessee player gets arrested?
Karl wrote the question. Karl supplied the answers. Karl waited for backup.
About 85 percent of the respondents told him no.
Then Karl started arguing with his own poll.
What if it were a coach? What about NIL? Everybody gets paid now. What about transparency? What about the fans?
Jaybird1 finally pointed toward the scoreboard: “85% disagree with you right now. Stay in your lane.”
Karl stayed in no lane.
LWSVol couldn’t think of a legitimate reason fans needed the details. MaryvilleVol, the board heel, offered even less comfort: Heupel suspended the kid, arrest records are public, and if you’re that curious you can search his name yourself.
That was really the problem.
Karl didn’t want the information to be available.
Karl wanted Tennessee to tell Karl.
He had Vol swag.
Then Heupel became a liar.
“Because he lied,” Karl wrote, citing Heupel’s explanation that Pendleton had gone through warmups, Tennessee ultimately decided not to play him against Furman and expected him back for Georgia Tech.
Breasec: All of those things happened. Where is the lie?
Nolensvol: What, exactly, is the lie?
A difficult afternoon for the prosecution.
By then Pendleton’s DUI had mostly disappeared beneath arguments about privacy, paid athletes, public figures and what Tennessee owes the people purchasing its merchandise.
BON eventually skipped all of that and called Karl an idiot.
Then CrossVolle left the cleanest and deepest wound:
“You and those like you aren’t near as important as you would like to think.”
No follow-up required. An E-bitchslap.
And somewhere off to the side was Glen Elarbee, because naturally Elarbee had been with Pendleton. The board has already blamed him for blocking, recruiting, development and the continuing shortage of anything useful in the o-line.
Now add being with Pendleton.
That ought to keep the offensive-line thread alive another week.
Karl’s poll, meanwhile, never moved.
85 percent: none of your business.
Karl wanted answers. REDACTED gave him one.
He wanted to speak to the poll’s manager.
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