Tennessee plays Kennesaw State tonight.

This appears to be news to the message board.

Kennesaw has received roughly the same amount of attention as the terms-and-conditions box on a software update. The actual Kennesaw thread had two replies.

Pat McAfee had 45. Lane Kiffin had 46. Gunnar Stockton somehow got compared to Heath Shuler and pulled 19. Morgan Freeman showed up on GameDay and immediately became a more important Tennessee football issue than the team Tennessee is playing.

Kennesaw hasn’t been disrespected. Disrespect requires acknowledgment. The board has simply stepped over them on the way to Texas.

Somebody asked about Morgan Freeman and suddenly half the board was conducting a fitness-for-duty hearing on an 89-year-old actor. Then came Gunnar Stockton. Heath was faster. Stockton is tougher. Heath had the better arm. No he didn’t. Terrible comparison. Perfect comparison.

Meanwhile, Kennesaw State remained safely unattended.

Then McAfee went back on trial. Fox is better. McAfee sucks. No he doesn’t. Change the channel. I shouldn’t have to.

Forty-five replies.

This has moved beyond confidence. Confidence is Tennessee by 35.

This is negligence.

The board has already mentally checked Tennessee’s box for the evening and wandered off to argue about Texas. And that kind of lackadaisical bullshit has consequences.

You think the players can’t feel it?

Six hundred Tennessee fans have spent all day acting like Kennesaw is a mandatory online training module, and now we expect the team to come flying out of the tunnel like Omaha Beach?

Bullshit.

That is how you get a false start on third-and-one. That is how somebody loses contain. That is how a reserve guard looks up and realizes nobody on the internet even bothered to learn Kennesaw’s mascot and suddenly gets forklifted into the quarterback.

The board’s complacency is going to cost Tennessee performance.

I don’t make the rules.

Which brings us to the Oh Shit Pregame Temperature Gauge.

Green is worried about the tailgate menu. Yellow vaguely remembers Tennessee has turned easy jobs into work orders before. Red already has TRAP GAME typed into the subject line.

And CNEagle has the crane.

Because even a cupcake can apparently require two Fire the DC threads, a quarterback argument, a halftime autopsy and heavy equipment.

Light lift.

Light industrial.

Of course, if Kennesaw scores first, every bit of this disappears.

The same people who ignored them all afternoon will become Kennesaw State experts before the extra point lands. Within ten minutes somebody will know the quarterback’s hometown, the offensive coordinator’s résumé and exactly why the warning signs were obvious all week.

By halftime they’ll swear they tried to tell us.