Didn't we play Cal or some other opener on a Sunday night in the mid 2000's? I think they've said weekdays are out, but Sunday is fine.
I'm not a big fan of the Thursday game but pretty much anything else to have a little fun and make a spectacle of, I'm in favor, be it now or if we'd won 9 straight national titles.
I don't like Thursday games for the city of Knoxville or UT alum. A lot of folks drive a good ways to attend the game. I think it would hurt attendance. Plus they have to work. Also, it would be devastatingly disruptive to classes that day and the next.
I had forgotten that was a Sunday game, I was there but I was only 12. I don't know if y'all could have foreseen the impending nosedive the program would take at the time, but as a naive 12 year old I thought we were about to be really dang good for the foreseeable future