Tennessee football: Jimmy Calloway suspension, SEC inaction suggest his punches were justified

He was ejected for throwing four to five punches on a play as Tennessee football beat the Akron Zips 63-6 last week. However, per multiple tweets from reports with 99.1 The Sports Animal, Calloway will only be suspended for a half against the Florida Gators.

On the surface, this is a bad look that makes no sense. Josh Heupel could have afforded to suspend Calloway for multiple games. Jalin Hyatt is fully healthy and is his main starter in the slot, Jimmy Holiday is still there, and Squirrel White has emerged.

Despite Calloway’s potential, he wasn’t going to see too much action against Florida. As a result, suspending him longer would have been Heupel’s chance to make a statement with no real consequences. It would have seemed justified given the number of punches he threw.

However, with Heupel taking the PR risk of not doing that, with little to gain, and the SEC backing him, there’s one obvious takeaway. Everybody involved who watched the film from the Akron game believes Calloway’s punches, while wrong, were somewhat understandable.

Heupel called the Akron game one of the chippiest he’s been a part of. There were grumblings all night that Akron seemed to be aiming low to try to hurt the Vols’ offensive players. Cedric Tillman and Jabari Small both left the game in the first half due to injuries.

The extent of their injuries is still unknown, but it certainly generated anger among Vol Nation. Even on a touchdown run by Dylan Sampson, one of the two option plays Heupel ran, it seemed as if Akron was trying to injure Hendon Hooker on his pitch.

Now, none of this is to justify what Calloway did. The conversation that it stemmed from the Akron defender grabbing and holding onto his facemask still doesn’t justify that many punches. However, if you look at the response, you can’t say higher-ups didn’t feel that way.

It would be one thing if Tennessee football made the decision to suspend Calloway for a half and didn’t get overridden by the SEC. That still would somewhat imply an understanding of Calloway’s anger, as the Vols don’t need him that desperately against Florida.

With the league office backing them, though, and not taking any further action, it seems to suggest that all objective parties involved in reviewing what happened felt a bit sympathetic towards Calloway. That’s a major indictment against Akron and what they were doing.

You might think the league and the Vols got it wrong, and honestly, you’d probably be right. There should be a zero-tolerance policy for throwing punches. The right move is probably to suspend a player one game for every punch he throws, which would warrant five games for Calloway.

Getting that aggressive is just something you can’t do. Baseball won’t let batters charge the mound, regardless of how dirty a pitcher is. Basketball doesn’t let players start fights out of anger over hard fouls. That could lead to the Malice at the Palace.

Such a standard should apply on the gridiron. Calloway can’t do what he did, regardless of how things played out. However, Tennessee football and the league office responding this way suggests they understand it, and that’s shocking to see.