ClayNation: No more volunteering for road trips

I'm retiring from going on the road to watch Tennessee play football. Done, finished. Watching your team give up 100 points to its top two rivals will do this to a person. Throw in another 45 against California and I've watched UT give up 145 while scoring only 68. And in all three of these games, the only time my Vols ever had the lead was 14-10 over Alabama on Saturday. For about four minutes.

The worst part was the realization that, despite suggestions otherwise from the Georgia game, UT is not a good football team. Combine that with the fact that the three teams who beat UT by double digits this season have lost six games among them -- it's not like we have been beaten by elite teams either.

Tennessee just isn't a good team. And no, that game against Georgia didn't count. (Getty Images)

Ultimately, UT has an atrocious defense. Seven games don't lie. Nor does giving up 100 points to your two biggest rivals. Fans can differ, but for me there's nothing worse than rooting for a team with a bad defense. Because you know that anyone can beat you. That's what being a UT fan is like this season. Even the 5-6 season of 2005 wasn't like this. That team had a great defense and managed to lose a ton of close games.

That was frustrating, but UT was competitive with everyone they played that year. You could literally have changed the outcome of three plays and that team would have been 8-3. Not this year. There have been three epic beat-downs. And I've seen them all in person. In opposing stadiums. Never in the UT cheering section.

It got so bad that an Alabama fan actually asked me to tone down my cursing. I wanted to tell him that after three games of watching our defense, my cursing was actually restrained. Instead I did my best to watch a team get a gridiron decapitation without cursing. Torture.

So I'm retiring from watching road games in person. Especially because this last game was the break of dawn LF/JP kickoff and I still haven't recovered. Anyway, here's a roster of how I coped this weekend:

1. The only thing that united UT and Alabama fans all weekend was a shared loathing of LF/JP. I can't even count the number of times I've heard this company's name cursed this year. Especially because this is the second Friday night I've spent in LF/JP towns. Last week was Oxford. As I left the City Grocery bar/restaurant sometime well after midnight, from out of nowhere a reader serenades me, "Hey Clay Travis, F'in JP." Only he calls out the full expletive. That's marketing genius.

2. One good point from a reader I talked to in Tuscaloosa. Why does the Big Ten have their own network of games in HD and the SEC has LF/JP which won't be capable of broadcasting in HD until 2078? It's time for the SEC to cut the cord and start doing it themselves.

Another good reader point about LF/JP from e-mail: The better your television set, the worse the LF/JP game looks. There's nothing like sitting down with a nice flat-screen television and watching a game from 1963 (with live updates on the Kennedy assassination).

The better your television set, the worse the LF/JP game looks. (Provided to CBSSports.com)

3. Friday, I did a book signing in Birmingham. I was scheduled to do one in Tuscaloosa on Saturday. Only the game was so early that I had to show up and just sign stock. The rationale, per Books-a-Million? "No one comes to book signings before noon." But they sure do love going to football games before noon. This might be LF/JP's ultimate revenge on me: Their games broadcast so early that they caused one of my book signings to be canceled.

4. Aside from the game, I had a really good time in Tuscaloosa. I know, this is sort of blasphemy. Maybe I should start going to UT road games and watching the game from my hotel room. It has been my experience that every time you go on the road and hang out with opposing SEC fans you have a great time.

I'm staying with my friend's girlfriend Kali. She lives within sight distance of the stadium and has enough alcohol to sink a large boat by the time we get there. She is an undergrad at Alabama majoring in something that I didn't understand. Here's what I wrote down on Friday night: International fortitude as it pertains to containing globalized influenza via toothpick fish.

5. When she asked me what I thought of the major, I said: "Very practical."