The last few minutes of last week’s Tennessee vs Oklahoma game should have been a relaxed, celebratory time for a Vol fan like me. Sure, Oklahoma had the ball, but Tennessee was up by 16 points (25-9), and it would have taken a stunning series of subsequent events all to go Oklahoma’s way for them to have any shot at a victory that day. To wit, they would have had to have scored, successfully gone for two, successfully executed an onside kick, then scored again, and successfully gone for two again to even tie the game, all in under two minutes.
The odds of all those things happening in the same game were infinitesimal at best, a fact that my rational side knew full well. However, that still didn’t stop me from getting a little nervous after Oklahoma, benefiting from their recent switch to a running quarterback, scored quickly and then lined up for a two-point try. As any Tennessee fan is well aware over many years of painful history, running quarterbacks are absolute kryptonite for our Vols, causing once 4 & 5-star defenders to forget how to run an angle or wrap up a tackle and turning once-capable defensive coordinators into barely functioning elementary school assistant coaches. “Here we go again,” I thought as I braced myself for the seemingly inevitable series of events that would lead to another gut-wrenching heartbreak after a once-promising start to the season.
If you think I behaved irrationally at that moment, you would be correct. However, you aren’t a Tennessee fan if you don't understand it. You see, we have nearly two decades of history to prove that highly improbable, even seemingly impossible events tend to routinely happen to the Vols at the worst possible moments to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in countless crucial games that would have made, but ended up breaking our seasons. I won’t bore you with a long list of them, except to say we even have a name for our paranoia - Battered Vol Syndrome, or BVS. Truly, if that diagnosis isn’t in the psychiatric textbooks as a verifiable disorder, it damn well should be. I know, because I and millions of Tennessee fans have significantly suffered from it for far too long.
As it happened, Oklahoma’s rally attempt fell woefully short along with that two-point attempt and the ensuing on-side kick. The Vols walked away with one of the more dominant ten-point victories in recent memory, and at an away game, no less against another storied program. Apparently, Tennessee is good again, or so we’ve been led to believe. I’m cautiously optimistic, though a not-small part of my brain is still waiting for the shoe to drop, probably against Florida.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, wonder no more. My experience during the Tennessee-Oklahoma game got me thinking about another possible diagnosis that many of us across the conservative political spectrum doubtless suffer from. I will call it ‘Battered Trump Syndrome,’ or BTS for short. You already know about Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), of course, but BTS is markedly different. While those who suffer from TDS tend to be liberals and leftists who just hate Donald Trump and are driven irrationally crazy by everything he does, their pathology is based on the fact that he did win, once. Sufferers of BTS, on the other hand, would love nothing more than to see Trump do well and win more elections for Republicans. We’ve just not seen a lot of that lately.
During my time supporting Ron DeSantis for the GOP nomination, I was accused by many on social media and even - gasp - commenters here on Townhall, of having TDS. Except, the accusations never fazed me because that was never actually the case. I did, however, as I fully realize now, have BTS. You see, sufferers of BTS don’t hate Trump himself or his policy positions, but we do look at various Trump and Trump-adjacent failures over the years and see that as evidence that the worst very well could again happen in November’s election. Sure, we had 2016’s improbable win, and that was great, but what has happened since? We lost the House in 2018, the Senate and presidency in 2020, and the predicted ‘Red Wave’ in 2022 resulted in barely a trickle and a razor-thin do-nothing House ‘majority’ that every political expert expects to be reversed this year no matter what happens with the other races.
So, given all that, what evidence do we have that Trump can pull it off this time? Like the ex-president, Tennessee football once hit the pinnacle, winning a national championship in 1998, but it’s been pretty much all downhill since then. And now that they are ‘good’ again, it’s hard to let go of all that trauma. For me and many others, it’s the same with Trump, and that’s why we initially wanted someone else to take the mantle.
The real question is, is Trump ‘good’ again? Not in every way, obviously, but ‘good’ enough to pull off a desperately needed win? The polling seems to be settling in to a close race, much closer than they were in 2020’s razor-thin election. It’s a good sign. I want to believe in Tennessee, and I want to believe in Donald Trump. But in the end, winning will be the only ultimate cure for my BVS AND my BTS.