The Greyhound Ticket That Almost Cost Tennessee a National Championship

Tee Martin was one Greyhound ride away from being a Tennessee legend nobody ever heard of.

The plan, as Martin understood it when he signed with the Vols, was simple: sit behind Peyton Manning for one year, then take over as the starting quarterback in 1997. That plan lasted right up until Manning skipped the top pick in the NFL Draft to come back for his senior season, and Martin still calls it a turning point. "It was one of my first lessons early in my college career," he said on the Hear Me Out Podcast with Elzy and Butts.

He hadn't seen it coming, either. "In recruiting, I was told that there's no way he's coming back for his senior season," Martin explained. "He's one of the hottest quarterbacks in the country, he'll be a first-round pick and all of this stuff." As far as Martin knew walking onto campus, the job was basically his on a delay.

Then came the press conference that changed everything. "They had that big press conference at Thompson-Boling Arena. I was in the lobby of Gibbs watching on that little TV down there, and I'm just kind of like, hold on, it's like a parade, everybody is at this thing," Martin said. In his head, a crowd that size could only mean one thing. "There's no way everyone's gonna show up if he's gonna leave... There's no way he's gonna stand in front of all these people and say, 'I'm leaving.'"

He was right. And instead of accepting it, he started packing.

New Tennessee football assistant coach Tee Martin waves to the crowd during the first half of Tennessee's home SEC conference game against Alabama at Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville on Saturday, January 19, 2019. Kns Utvolsbasketballbama Bp Jpg | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

The bags were already zipped.

"I had already started thinking. I had a bus ticket at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Knoxville," Martin admitted. He'd called around and told most of his family he was coming home, with one very deliberate exception. "Not my mom, because she didn't want me to come home and not stay at Tennessee." And this wasn't hypothetical packing. "I grabbed a couple of little bags, and I was downtown at the Greyhound station," he said, standing in a bus terminal ready to walk away from the program that would make him a national champion two years later.

Then a coach and a couple of roommates ruined a perfectly good exit.

"Coach Pat Washington, who recruited me, got a hold of me. I don't know how he found out I was there, but he found out and came and talked to me," Martin said. "And a couple of my teammates came over to the dorm and talked to me, and I ended up staying."

That's the whole championship right there, hiding inside one sentence. No Pat Washington sprinting downtown, no teammates working the phones, and Tennessee's 1998 quarterback is on his way back to Alabama with a duffel bag instead of a ring.

Bus — Darren Lewis, 57, bus driver, walks over to drive a Greyhound bus headed to Dallas, Texas, at Union Station in Jackson, Miss., on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023. Greyhound Lines Inc., the largest provider of intercity bus transportation in North America, resumed service in Jackson on Wednesday. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

But staying didn't magically fix Martin's mood.

"That was a rough year because I wanted to play. I felt like I was ready to play," he said. He's quick to point out none of it was resentment toward Manning. "It was nothing against Peyton coming back. He was great for us the following year." The frustration was purely about timing. "But I was being selfish in the moment where I thought I was ready to play. I thought it was my time, and I had to wait a little longer."

That "little longer" turned into the exact preparation Tennessee needed.

Martin didn't get to play his way into readiness on the fly in 1998. He'd already spent two extra seasons absorbing the offense from the bench, the same two seasons he'd tried to skip out on from a bus station. When Manning finally left and the job became his, Martin wasn't stepping into the fire cold. He was stepping in rehearsed.

So who actually handed Tennessee its shot at a title? Not just Martin's arm, and, honestly, not even really Martin's patience, since, by his own account, he had none of it that day. It was Pat Washington chasing down a runaway recruit, two teammates talking to him in a dorm room, and a mother back home who wouldn't let her son quit even from three hundred miles away. Take any one of them out of the story, and the 1998 Volunteers are looking for a different quarterback.

Martin didn't want to wait.

He wanted to play, wanted his shot, wanted it on his own timeline instead of anyone else's.

But the two years he spent fighting that feeling turned out to be the two years that built the quarterback who could actually handle the moment when it finally came. Tennessee got a national championship out of it. Martin got a career, a legacy, and a story he still tells decades later, on a podcast, with a laugh, because it worked out exactly the way it was supposed to.

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