Tennessee Is Asking Fans For $150,000 To Replace The Goal Posts They Threw In The River After Beating Alabama

Tennessee picked up its biggest win in a very long time on Saturday evening, as the Vols managed to out-gun Alabama in a 52-49 shootout in Knoxville, winning on a last second field goal that just crept over the crossbar.

It’s the first time Tennessee has beaten Alabama since Nick Saban took over in Tuscaloosa, and it moved them from being one of college football’s nice stories to a legitimate contender in the minds of most. As one would expect after such a win, the 100,000 fans in Neyland Stadium poured onto the field and, for some reason, Tennessee doesn’t have the goal posts with a hinge that can be taken down so we got an old school goal post teardown scene, with fans eventually hauling the uprights out of the stadium like ants carrying leaves, and deposited them in the Tennessee River, as is tradition.

On Sunday, the SEC fined Tennessee $100,000 for the fans storming the field, which they won’t really care about, and school president Randy Boyd joked on Saturday night he didn’t care how much the goal posts were gonna cost to replace. However, the Vols posted on Sunday with a cheeky fundraiser trying to raise $150,000 to “replace the goal posts,” which got a mixed reaction on Twitter.

As of writing they’d raised $32,000, so it clearly worked with some folks, but there were plenty who replied and quote tweeted with links to the Vols $1.34 billion endowment or the $55 million payment they received last year simply for being in the SEC. Fundraising off a big win is standard operating procedure in college football, but this felt to some like an odd way to go about it for a program certainly not hurting for funding.