Tennessee’s new football training facility will include an MMA cage

The Tennessee Vols had $45 million and 145,000 square feet to work with for their new state-of-the-art football facility, so head coach Derek Dooley wanted to make sure ever inch of it was put to good use. Well, sort of. As you can see from the promotional video above, construction is underway on the new training center. It includes everything from a spacious locker room with iPod and cell phone chargers at each locker to a hydrotherapy room and an eating room that Dooley calls a “restaurant.” Oh yeah, and it has a mixed martial arts cage.

Why? Your guess is as good as ours. After hearing the explanation Dooley gave to the Knoxville News Sentinel, you’ll likely still be completely puzzled.

Players will be able to walk straight from the 120-yard practice field into the new weight room — a 22,000 square foot “multilevel thunderdome of power,” as it’s called in UT’s promotional video for the facility. Along with the standard free weights, machines, cardiovascular training equipment — which will be situated on a deck that overlooks the weight room — and a nutrition bar, it will feature a mixed martial arts cage “so we can go in and fight and all that stuff,” Dooley said.

The cardiovascular equipment, the nutrition bar and all that stuff makes sense, but can anything good come of having an MMA cage in a football facility? How many injuries are going to come as a result of 250-pound college kids beating the crap out of each other for fun in the octagon? Maybe this is all some sort of elaborate prank that Dooley and the Tennessee program have put together to screw with us. Or maybe I just need to get with the times?

Let’s just hope whoever paints and letters the doors of the facility is a bit more careful this time around.

Helmet back to Dr. Saturday for passing the story along