Tennessee Volunteers New Practice Facility Features MMA Cage
There’s been an arms race in the SEC for quite some time now. Tensions are rising and the flow of money has increased to incredible new heights as six straight national championships have raised the stakes for SEC football. Every program in the, soon to be, 14-team league feels the pressure to either succeed at the highest possible level or to maintain that level of success, and state-of-the-art facilities are constantly being built and renovated to stay ahead of the curve.
However, one SEC school appears to be a bit TOO far head of the curve.
The University of Tennessee has a new $45 million football practice facility set to open in August that is meant to rival the digs of just about every program in the country. It’s got everything you could want, and unfortunately quite a bit more.
The 145,000 square-foot building has the essentials. A 120-yard indoor practice facility and a beautiful 22,000 square-foot multi-level weight room, but in that weight room is something that you wouldn’t quite expect, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense whatsoever.
Inside the weight room will be an MMA cage. For fighting. And God know what other sorts of stupidity.
Oh, and by the way, they’ll be calling their weight room the “thunderdome of power.”
I can’t help but imagine a never-ending Metallica playlist.
I’ll have nightmares about probable pre-season All-SEC quarterback and twig impersonator Tyler Bray being knocked unconscious and lying flat on his offensive back tattoo while “Enter Sandman” plays in the background, or any other of a million scenarios where something goes wrong within the confines of the cage.
It seem like complete lunacy, and it definitely has bad idea written all over it, but if the Tennessee Volunteers by some miracle win 9 or 10 games next year, you can bet we’ll see octagons popping up all over the country, with a particularly heavy concentration in the Southeast. It’s the nature of the beast.
