2022 Greatest Community Impact Award Winner
2022 Best Video Short Award Winner
The University of Tennessee has two Smokeys — the famous live Bluetick Coonhound who leads the team onto the field, and the costumed mascot character who works the crowd, the community, and increasingly, social media. This blog covers the costumed Smokey, who earned two Mascot Hall of Fame honors in 2022: the Greatest Community Impact Award (Collegiate category) and the Best Video Short Award (Collegiate category). UT’s Smokey represents the Volunteers in the NCAA Southeastern Conference (SEC) — one of the most passionate fan bases in all of college sports — and somehow still manages to make every appearance feel personal.
Bringing Smiles to Nursing Homes Across East Tennessee
While Smokey attends hundreds of community events each year, his standout 2022 community initiative focused on a group that often gets overlooked: nursing home residents across East Tennessee. Whether visiting room by room just to say hello or attending parties organized by facility staff, Smokey made his way through numerous facilities — bringing smiles to hundreds of residents who would otherwise have no way to see him in person or feel a personal connection to the University of Tennessee.
The response from staff said it all. One administrator told Smokey during a summer visit, “You have no idea what this means to us. We’ve seen residents smile today that we haven’t seen smile in a long, long time.” That’s the kind of impact that doesn’t show up in a box score.
Going Viral for All the Right Reasons
On the content side, Smokey launched a TikTok account and, within just 30 days, amassed nearly 40,000 followers and millions of video views. His standout video — released the week of the Tennessee vs. Florida rivalry game — showed a gator sneaking onto iconic Neyland Stadium’s field, only to be heroically gator-wrestled by Smokey and removed from the premises. No words, no music — just pure mascot storytelling. The video topped 350,000 views and, as it turned out, foreshadowed the outcome of the actual game a few days later.
Neyland Stadium seats over 100,000 fans and is consistently one of the largest stadiums in the country — making it arguably the world’s most intense place to be a gator.
