Author Archives: Will Shelton

We said for weeks if the Vols added one of Auburn/LSU/Texas A&M and one Mississippi school, in any combination, Tennessee would be getting a fair deal. Turns out, not so much: the Vols travel to Auburn and host Texas A&M (for the first time! in front of few/no fans!).

https://t.co/h2WVUaEz16

— Southeastern Conference (@SEC) August 7, 2020

Our immediate takeaways:

The imbalance with Florida and Georgia hurts most. The Gators and Dawgs each play two of the SEC West’s top four teams, AND now they both play Arkansas as well, negating whatever advantage that already provided Tennessee. Georgia added the Hogs and Mississippi State to their already-difficult combo of Alabama and Auburn. Florida, who had the scheduling advantage before the pandemic, keeps LSU and adds Texas A&M while also facing Ole Miss and Arkansas. But the Vols will get Alabama, Auburn, and A&M. That’s two Top 15 SEC West opponents for Florida and Georgia, but three – including Alabama – for Tennessee. This is the biggest gripe, and the biggest block in the way of any dark horse hopes in the SEC East.

Arkansas has the most difficult schedule in the conference. Which makes sense for a team riding a 19-game SEC losing streak? One thing was clear: the league favored its best teams instead of balance across the board. One SEC West team had to play both Florida and Georgia, and the league decided it should be the Razorbacks.

Using the SP+ tier system from our mock schedule, here’s how each division’s schedules rank:

SEC East

• 9 tier points (most difficult): Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee
• 10 tier points: Georgia, Missouri, Vanderbilt
• 11 tier points: Florida

SEC West

• 7 tier points: Arkansas
• 8 tier points: Alabama, Auburn
• 10 tier points: Mississippi State, Texas A&M
• 11 tier points: Ole Miss
• 12 tier points: LSU

For reference, LSU plays Florida, Missouri, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt. It’s good to be the king, apparently.

How the schedule falls is now the most important thing for Tennessee. Since literally half the schedule is against a Top 15 opponent, the Vols should really hope to see those five teams every other game, alternating between:

• Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Texas A&M
• Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Vanderbilt

But, as we’ve seen, don’t count on the powers that be in the SEC to show favor to a program that isn’t at the top right now.

One final note: Tennessee’s current athletic director comes from a time when the Vols welcomed anyone, anywhere, anytime.

If they play this thing, we’re gonna need all of that mentality.

Go Vols.

While we’re waiting for the real thing, here’s my best attempt at a mock 10-game league schedule. The guiding principles:

The two new opponents are added based on strength of schedule. I used preseason SP+ data to put each division in four tiers:

• SEC East 1: Florida, Georgia
• SEC East 2: Kentucky, Tennessee
• SEC East 3: Missouri, South Carolina
• SEC East 4: Vanderbilt
• SEC West 1: Alabama
• SEC West 2: Auburn, LSU, Texas A&M
• SEC West 3: Ole Miss, Mississippi State
• SEC West 4: Arkansas

We originally did this exercise to pick new opponents more than three weeks ago, but I made a copy/paste error on Auburn’s schedule and fooled myself into thinking no SEC West team had to play both Florida and Georgia. In reality, someone does, and I went with Auburn for a couple of reasons. The Tigers get the benefit of also playing Vanderbilt. If we anticipated full stadiums, I would’ve given Alabama both the Dawgs and Gators in Tuscaloosa. But that seems out of balance with home field worth far less this year, so this way both Auburn and Alabama play Georgia, then split the rest of the SEC East, with Auburn getting both Florida and Vanderbilt for balance. There’s also still a rivalry factor (I think) with the Gators and Auburn, annual foes before the league switched formats in 2003. Otherwise, I stuck with the two new opponents selected in that piece three weeks ago.

If each tier is worth its designated point value, every team in the league plays a cross-divisional schedule worth either nine or ten points, except now Auburn is at eight points.

Team	Annual	2020	New	New
Florida	LSU	Ole Miss	Auburn	Texas A&M
Georgia	Auburn	Alabama	Arkansas	Miss State
Kentucky	Miss State	Auburn	LSU	Ole Miss
Missouri	Arkansas	Miss State	Alabama	LSU
S Carolina	Texas A&M	LSU	Alabama	Arkansas
Tennessee	Alabama	Arkansas	Ole Miss	Texas A&M
Vanderbilt	Ole Miss	Texas A&M	Auburn	Miss State
Alabama	Tennessee	Georgia	Missouri	S Carolina
Arkansas	Missouri	Tennessee	Georgia	S Carolina
Auburn	Georgia	Kentucky	Florida	Vanderbilt
LSU	Florida	S Carolina	Kentucky	Missouri
Ole Miss	Vanderbilt	Florida	Kentucky	Tennessee
Miss State	Kentucky	Missouri	Georgia	Vanderbilt
Texas A&M	S Carolina	Vanderbilt	Florida	Tennessee

Now that we’ve got the teams, the schedule itself:

Division games are played the first seven weeks, with annual rivalries taking up the odd team out slot each week. So from September 26 through November 7, each week would feature six divisional games and one annual rivalry. Every team gets a bye on November 14. This leaves room for any early season cancellations to slide over. Then the existing 2020 rotating opponent is played on November 21 (SEC West hosting this year), so we put SEC East hosts for new games on November 28 and back to the West for the season finale on December 5.

(If you can’t see the full tables, turn your phone to landscape mode or click here for a better look via Google Sheets.)

SEC East

	FLA	UGA	UK	MIZ	SCAR	TEN	VAN
9.26	UK	AUB	at FLA	VAN	TEN	at SCAR	at MIZ
10.3	LSU	at MIZ	at TEN	UGA	at VAN	UK	SCAR
10.10	at VAN	at SCAR	MSU	at TEN	UGA	MIZ	FLA
10.17	vs UGA	vs FLA	VAN	at SCAR	MIZ	ALA	UK
10.24	MIZ	at UK	UGA	at FLA	A&M	at VAN	TEN
10.31	SCAR	TEN	at MIZ	UK	at FLA	at UGA	MISS
11.7	at TEN	VAN	SCAR	vs ARK	at UK	FLA	at UGA
11.14
11.21	at MISS	at ALA	at AUB	at MSU	at LSU	at ARK	at A&M
11.28	A&M	MSU	LSU	ALA	ARK	MISS	AUB
12.5	at AUB	at ARK	at MISS	at LSU	at ALA	at A&M	at MSU

SEC West

	ALA	ARK	AUB	LSU	MISS	MSU	A&M
9.26	at ARK	ALA	at UGA	MISS	at LSU	A&M	at MSU
10.3	at MISS	at MSU	A&M	at FLA	ALA	ARK	at AUB
10.10	A&M	LSU	at MISS	at ARK	AUB	at UK	at ALA
10.17	at TEN	at A&M	LSU	at AUB	MSU	at MISS	ARK
10.24	at LSU	MISS	at MSU	ALA	at ARK	AUB	at SCAR
10.31	MSU	at AUB	ARK	at A&M	at VAN	at ALA	LSU
11.7	AUB	vs MIZ	at ALA	MSU	at A&M	at LSU	MISS
11.14
11.21	UGA	TEN	UK	SCAR	FLA	MIZ	VAN
11.28	at MIZ	at SCAR	at VAN	at UK	at TEN	at UGA	at FLA
12.5	SCAR	UGA	FLA	MIZ	UK	VAN	TEN

It’s not perfect, but really any of those first seven weeks can be moved around. The way I’ve drawn it up, the Vols get Georgia and Florida back-to-back, and Alabama plays four of its first five on the road, something I think we’d have to see the conference office do to believe it. But in a season of weirdness, I like the balance this schedule is built on. Like anything else right now, it seeks to make the best of the given moment.

When the Big Ten announced it was going to conference-only play three weeks ago, we looked at a balanced version of a 10-game SEC schedule if the league elected to move in the same direction. Like the ACC’s version, something like that would involve some willingness to get creative from the league office, to insert themselves in the interests of fairness and balance. That schedule we put together featured no SEC West teams playing both Florida and Georgia, and every SEC East team who played Alabama also playing Arkansas.

Yesterday Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger reported the SEC was indeed looking at a 10-game league schedule, and that the extra two games would come instead from the pre-existing rotation opponents from 2021 and 2022:

If SEC prezs vote conference-only, 2 additional SEC games could be the next 2 in each team's rotation.

BAMA: UF, VU
AU: SC, MU
ARK: UG, SC
LSU: UK, UT
MSU: VU, UG
OM: UT, UK
TAMU: MU, UF
—
UF: BAMA, TAMU
UG: ARK, MSU
UK: LSU, OM
MU: TAMU, AU
SC: AU, ARK
UT: OM, LSU
VU: MSU, BAMA

— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 29, 2020

So this is a straightforward solution, and it involves no additional decision making from anyone. But how fair is it?

For Tennessee, it’s one of several balanced options. Because the Vols were already playing the presumptive best and worst teams in the SEC West, any combination of one of the Mississippi schools and one of Auburn, LSU, or Texas A&M would’ve been the most fair way to add to Tennessee’s slate. Here the Vols get Ole Miss in Knoxville and LSU in Baton Rouge, giving Tennessee one of the most even slates in the league.

The biggest news for Tennessee: now Florida and Georgia both have to play Alabama. So after a dozen or so years of complaining about it, in 2020 the Vols have zero disadvantage from playing the Crimson Tide in comparison to their SEC East rivals. In fact, consider the balance or lack thereof here:

• Florida: LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Texas A&M
• Georgia: Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi State
• Tennessee: Alabama, Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss

The Gators had a huge advantage coming into this season with both Georgia and Tennessee playing Alabama. Now? Not only do the Gators pick up the Tide, they get Texas A&M as well. Florida plays three SEC West contenders; the Vols and Dawgs just two.

Also, potential advantage Kentucky:

• Kentucky: Mississippi State, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss

…who doesn’t face Alabama at all and still gets both Mississippi schools. This arrangement is a big boost to the Cats.

In our post three weeks ago, we used the 2020 SP+ projections to put each division in four tiers, and sought to create a schedule with the most balance across the board. In what we came up with, every team’s cross-divisional opponents had a total of nine or ten tier points. If the league just sticks with the future rotations, the tier points would look like this:

• Florida: LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Texas A&M (8 tier points)
• Georgia: Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi State (10)
• Kentucky: Mississippi State, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss (10)
• South Carolina: Texas A&M, LSU, Auburn, Arkansas (10)
• Tennessee: Alabama, Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss (10)
• Vanderbilt: Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Alabama, Mississippi State (9)

• Alabama: Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Vanderbilt (8 tier points)
• Arkansas: Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina (9)
• Auburn: Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Missouri (9)
• LSU: Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky (8)
• Ole Miss: Florida, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Kentucky (9)
• Mississippi State: Missouri, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Georgia (10)
• Texas A&M: South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Missouri, Florida (11)

The winners in this setup: Kentucky to some degree, but look at Texas A&M: no Georgia, no Tennessee, no Kentucky. Meanwhile Alabama is easily the biggest loser here – and hey, if I’m a Bammer, maybe I’m saying screw all this, we’ll beat everybody! – but the difference between their cross-divisional schedule and Texas A&M’s is huge. And Florida, as we’ve discussed, went from one of the East’s easiest slates to its most difficult.

If the SEC does go this route, it’s more simple but less fair.

But not to Tennessee.

If the only certainty right now is uncertainty, college football echoes it best by the absence of any central leadership. The NCAA offers little top-down guidance when it comes to football, and we’re seeing it play out in real time. The simplest solution to a lack of central leadership in college football – the Power Five conferences working together – is already out the window with the Big Ten and Pac-12 going to a league-only model without waiting for (or perhaps even trying to build?) consensus.

That doesn’t mean the most lucrative path forward isn’t Power Five only college football. Stewart Mandel said it best in The Athletic yesterday:

But more than anything, this crisis has laid bare that there are a small handful of schools (the Power 5 and a few others) with the resources to even be trying to field sports teams this fall. The other 200-something Division I athletic departments are just trying to survive until next year.

(He goes on to point out that if the College Football Playoff – governed by a board of managers with equal representation from all ten conferences and Notre Dame – voted to move the CFP to the spring, would individual conferences buck that kind of system to play in the fall anyway?)

Maybe we get a vaccine that works and is widely adopted by the public in time to have a fully-functional football season in the spring. Maybe that leads to college football looking more or less the same, at least on the Power Five level, in 2022: eight or nine conference games, a major out-of-conference games, two mid-majors and an FCS opponent.

But if the maybes get thin, the bottom starts falling out for mid-majors, and no one’s in charge at the top? There’s no telling what college football might look like. There’s no telling if the flow of a season we’ve come to know for almost 30 years since the SEC went to divisional play and dominoes started falling toward the Bowl Alliance and BCS…might’ve been seen for the last time in 2019.

Who knows. But to whatever degree we’re able to think long-term right now, one question becomes, “How could the SEC be improved?”

Things that are normally reserved for fantasy booking now have a chance at reality, even if only because if feels like everything is on the table. For example, if all of college football went wild west, the SEC could just stay as it is and play round robin every year. Thirteen games and a fair champion (unless you get a three-way tie) because everyone plays everyone. Suddenly 8-5 doesn’t look so bad! To make it more interesting for all involved, take your top four teams at the end of the regular season and play an SEC Final Four, with semifinal games at home sites and the SEC Championship in Atlanta. This way 28.5% of your league makes the playoffs, still a far more meaningful number than we usually see in sports.

But this and any scenario that involves removing FCS/mid-major players would fundamentally change an idea that Tennessee and the league’s traditional powers have been chasing for those same 30+ years: perfection is attainable.

I used to believe it’s what made college football great. It’s what happens when you grow up in a time when your team has a chance to go undefeated every year and actually does it once.

But the last dozen years have been both humbling and enlightening. And even before then, I’ve found some of the most enjoyment from some of Tennessee’s most compelling stories, and those came in seasons with plenty of adversity like 2007 in football and 2010 in basketball.

Since 2008, Alabama is 150-17 (.898). The next closest teams in wins are Clemson and Boise State with 133. In winning percentage, it’s Ohio State at .845. And in the SEC, LSU is second-best in the last twelve years with 120 wins. That’s thirty fewer victories in a dozen years.

So who’s to say Alabama wouldn’t just keep winning if they were playing the full SEC gauntlet? Who’s to say new cupcakes wouldn’t emerge over time to replace the old ones? But I think an SEC-only setup that gave four teams from the league a chance to “win it all” every year would do some tremendous good for the mental health of a fan base. Much better than losing to Alabama in the SEC West (or Spurrier’s Florida in the 90’s in the East) and feeling like your whole season is over for one blemish. If you do earn perfection, it means more than ever before. And when you almost certainly don’t, you’re not a crazy person just because your team went 10-3. This kind of setup produces more compelling stories.

It would certainly mean compelling match-ups every time out. The year before the SEC went to divisional play, do you know who Tennessee played in the non-conference in 1991? Louisville, UCLA, Notre Dame, and Memphis (State). There’s saying every game matters, and then there’s scheduling like it. If the “least-appealing” game in your schedule is Vanderbilt, it still counts in the standings. Plus, rivalries past become rivalries present: hello, Auburn. In West Tennessee, hello Ole Miss. And goodbye, disadvantage of being the only SEC East team to play Alabama every year.

This is never the best question to ask to pursue a more fruitful solution, but how much would you mind if something like this happened? If it did, I think the majority of SEC fans would take it. An SEC team has won the national championship 12 times in the last 22 years, plus undefeated Auburn in 2004, plus SEC teams that played for the title and lost in 2013, 2016, and 2018. That’s 16 out of 22 years before we even have to bring up what the Vols did in the SEC Championship Game in 2001. No SEC Champion has anything to prove to anyone. If we just played within our own league every year and crowned a champion, you’d feel just fine about the end result and the champion could still talk trash to Clemson or Ohio State in theory.

Are there better, more inclusive models out there? Sure; we’ll keep fantasy booking and look at some of those another day. But if a worst-case scenario for the SEC with no NCAA leadership and not enough cooperation within Power Five leagues is just to play itself round robin every year? That’s a pretty good safety net.

Back in the good old days – not just pre-pandemic, but when we still got a college football video game – this was the week the season really started feeling close. The annual mid-July release from EA Sports made college football’s approach a little more tangible. So did media days, also absent from our calendar this year.

On Saturday, a normally-played season would be seven weeks away, driving our countdown under 50 days. But right now it feels like we’re all operating under a different kind of countdown, with “life returns to normal” at the end but no way of knowing for sure how many days are left.

It’s really a myth, of course. Even if all of this ends with football being appreciated more than ever, from both a fan and an economic standpoint, our “normal” will be something new. That’s true far beyond football, and one of the few available guarantees.

Between now and then, long-term planning feels impossible across the board. For a school like Tennessee – not just Power 5, but one of the most profitable programs in the nation – maybe college football could end up with an arrangement we like even more than the one we have now. We don’t have to worry about the program being shut down or scrambling to find a new conference. I find in conversations about scheduling changes, including the potential of adding two more SEC games, I’m excited about the potential to play more meaningful games in a season. So much has been upended, there will be some freedom to make new rules, and the Vols will have a seat at that table.

But between now and whatever college football will look like in the days of a vaccine, there is so much we don’t know it’s hard to build a bridge from here to there. Instead, we’re left trying to see how much of the season we thought we’d have we can save.

This leads us into conversations not about what’s best for college football’s future, but how much we can retain from what may soon be college football’s past. Maybe that’s the only thing we can do right now. But it takes us to conversations like, “What’s the least amount of football we could meaningfully play?”

In general, “what’s the least we can do,” isn’t a good way to do business. But if the powers that be wish to avoid a spring season at all costs, which seems to be the tone of the moment, then there has to be a floor on how few games they’d play in the fall for the season to still have value. Leagues that have moved to conference-only play can more easily control protocols and scheduling, a step the SEC hasn’t been willing to take just yet. But even if it’s just league play, there are different ways to pull it off and different schools of thought. Brandon Marcello at 247 did the best job I’ve seen in laying out all the different options, including the points most relevant to “the least we can do”: every team needs to play its divisional games.

Six games should be the floor for football this fall, the most likely outcome there being the Vols would play only their SEC East brethren. I’m not smart enough to know if six games in the fall is worth more than attempting a full(er) season in the spring. But I do know anything less than six games this fall should mean we punt.

There’s some thought to pushing the season back to mid-to-late October in this format, knowing you could knock out six games in the back half of the regularly-played season. But with no one expecting a readily-available vaccine by then, pushing it back to October on the front end means we’re simply hoping some combination of the virus and people’s behavior work more to our advantage by then.

One potential solution, if the powers that be in the SEC wanted to commit to six games on the front end: have East and West teams play on alternating weekends, giving each team a bye week between every game to allow for more time between contests when infection may be most likely. This setup wouldn’t be flexible on the fly, but builds in more protection:

September 5

Kentucky at Florida

Vanderbilt at Missouri

Tennessee at South Carolina

BYE: Georgia

September 12

Alabama at Ole Miss

Arkansas at Mississippi State

Texas A&M at Auburn

BYE: LSU

September 19

Florida at Tennessee

Vanderbilt at Georgia

South Carolina at Kentucky

BYE: Missouri

September 26

Ole Miss at LSU

Alabama at Arkansas

Texas A&M at Mississippi State

BYE: Auburn

October 3

Missouri at South Carolina

Georgia vs Florida

Vanderbilt at Kentucky

BYE: Tennessee

October 10

Auburn at Ole Miss

LSU at Arkansas

Texas A&M at Alabama

BYE: Mississippi State

October 17

Missouri at Tennessee

Georgia at South Carolina

Florida at Vanderbilt

BYE: Kentucky

October 24

Mississippi State at Alabama

Arkansas at Auburn

LSU at Texas A&M

BYE: Ole Miss

October 31

Kentucky at Missouri

Tennessee at Georgia

South Carolina at Florida

BYE: Vanderbilt

November 7

Ole Miss at Texas A&M

Mississippi State at LSU

Auburn at Alabama

BYE: Arkansas

November 14

South Carolina at Vanderbilt

Georgia at Missouri

Kentucky at Tennessee

BYE: Florida

November 21

Arkansas vs Texas A&M

LSU at Auburn

Mississippi State at Ole Miss

BYE: Alabama

November 28

Tennessee at Vanderbilt

Missouri at Florida

Georgia at Kentucky

BYE: South Carolina

December 5

Alabama at LSU

Auburn at Mississippi State

Ole Miss at Arkansas

BYE: Texas A&M

I’m not sure there are any good answers right now. But if we’re playing this fall, it should be at least six games against divisional opponents. Would you take a season that looked like this as opposed to trying again in the spring?

With the Big Ten announcing they’re only playing conference games this fall, there’s a sense we might see all the Power Five conferences move in that direction quickly. That’s eight games for SEC teams instead of 13, so there’s an obvious sense the league might try to add one or two more.

There are all kinds of conversations worth having here, starting with whether we should be playing football or not, of course. I’m in no way trying to answer those questions in this post, nor am I convinced that we absolutely should play this fall no matter what. As many of you know, in the real world I’m a United Methodist pastor; we haven’t been in our building in 17 weeks, and just had church at a minor league baseball stadium last night. Who knows what next week will bring?

But if the SEC does go to conference games only and chooses to add two games (and not seek to add even more and play a true 13-game round robin), how can they do it most fairly?

I took the existing cross-division match-ups and added two more for each team, looking for the most balanced setup possible. I used the preseason 2020 SP+ rankings to group teams in four tiers for each division:

SEC East

1. Florida, Georgia
2. Kentucky, Tennessee
3. Missouri, South Carolina
4. Vanderbilt

SEC West

1. Alabama
2. Auburn, LSU, Texas A&M
3. Ole Miss, Mississippi State
4. Arkansas

From there, in creating the schedule I added up the points for each team you’d face per their tier. This was governed by two basic ideas:

• No one from the SEC West plays both Florida and Georgia (EDIT: Fooled by a copy/paste error, this is actually impossible. If every team is going to play four cross-division games, someone has to play both Florida and Georgia. I gave that distinction to Auburn, as was the plan in my original notes before I thought I’d gotten away with not having to. For more on this, check out our full 10-game proposal here).
• Everyone from the SEC East who plays Alabama also plays Arkansas

That leaves us with something like this:

• Florida: Auburn, LSU, Texas A&M, Ole Miss (9 tier points)
• Georgia: Alabama, Auburn, Mississippi State, Arkansas (10)
• Kentucky: Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State (10)
• Missouri: Alabama, LSU, Mississippi State, Arkansas (10)
• South Carolina: Alabama, LSU, Texas A&M, Arkansas (9)
• Tennessee: Alabama, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Arkansas (10)
• Vanderbilt: Auburn, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Arkansas (10)

• Alabama: Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, South Carolina (9)
• Arkansas: Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, South Carolina (9)
• Auburn: Georgia, Kentucky, Florida, Vanderbilt (10)
• LSU: Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Missouri (9)
• Ole Miss: Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Vanderbilt (9)
• Mississippi State: Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Vanderbilt (10)
• Texas A&M: Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Vanderbilt (10)

There is no perfect balance unless everyone plays everyone. Six of the league’s teams got nine tier points for a slightly tougher schedule, but that group includes Alabama, LSU, and Florida so you have some of your best teams playing slightly tougher schedules.

It feels like a fair trade for Tennessee: you’re already playing the presumptive top and bottom seeds from the West, so let’s add one team from the top in A&M and one towards the bottom in Ole Miss.

What would you do differently?

In the moment, our favorite stories of the last decade all happened in the first five weeks of the 2016 season. There’s else nothing in the last ten years that even remotely compares to the spectacle of Bristol, the streak against Florida, and the final snap in Athens. If you can live with a little discomfort, throw in the near-miss against Appalachian State and the insanity of the Texas A&M game, and you’ll be hard pressed to find more adrenaline in a six week span in Tennessee’s entire canon. As we were fond of saying at the time, falling behind 14-0 in front of the largest crowd in football history was only the fifth-most-stressful thing to happen to Tennessee in its first six games.

In the moment, those three wins, in any order, are the decade’s peak. But in what became too common a theme under Butch Jones, signature wins never led to signature seasons. And those great moments – particularly in the first half of 2016 – were left with an unfortunate aftertaste of, “Yeah, but…”. In the moment, there was nothing better in the last ten years. But when ranking the ultimate importance of those moments in the last ten years, the first half of 2016 only comes in at number five in our countdown.

That disconnect makes those three games more isolated memories than pieces of a whole. If we did take them together, I’d put them on a short list of seasons in my lifetime with a trio of wins as memorable:

• 1989: The program’s sudden turnaround against #6 UCLA and #4 Auburn in September, plus the Cotton Bowl over #10 Arkansas to finish an 11-1 campaign.
• 1995: Peyton Manning’s first huge game at #18 Arkansas, the streak-buster at #12 Alabama the very next week, and the Citrus Bowl over #4 Ohio State.
• 1998: Plenty to choose from, but we could do this forever and not find three more memorable days in one season than Florida, Arkansas, and Florida State.
• 2001: The win over #14 LSU after 9/11, the high-stakes win in Gainesville in December, and the palate-cleanser against #17 Michigan in the Citrus Bowl.
• 2003: The road warriors: a second straight win in Gainesville, five overtimes in Tuscaloosa, and busting #6 Miami’s 26-game home winning streak.
• 2004: James Wilhoit against Florida, a huge upset at #4 Georgia, and a 38-7 beat down of #22 Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl

You’re going to take 1998 first on that list, but after that? The Battle at Bristol, the comeback against Florida, and the hail mary at Georgia will stand up to any of those years.

On the other end of this spectrum are years like 2019. I’d argue there’s not a signature win from last year, in part because I’m not sure we can agree on what the best win was. The Vols didn’t beat a ranked team or a traditional rival. Is it the second-half surge against South Carolina? The goal line stand at Kentucky? Three receivers with more than 100 yards at Missouri? The Gator Bowl comeback?

And yet, the whole of the 2019 season left us more satisfied than the whole of the 2016 season. Sometimes the schedule simply doesn’t afford you as many chances to make memories; we make this point about Heath Shuler’s 1993 team often. That group is Tennessee’s highest-rated team of the 90’s in SP+, but was more known for a tie and a shootout loss than beating #22 Georgia and #13 Louisville by a combined score of 83-16.

When the Vols finally do marry signature wins and a signature season for the first time since 2007, I think we’ll be able to look back on those three games from 2016 far more fondly. Until then, they’re the most recent reminder of what could have been. And they deserve to be much more than that.

More in this series:

#10: Are you sure the referees have left the field?

#9: A Smokey Gray Almost

#8: How will we remember Georgia State?

#7: Josh Dobbs Ignites

#6: All We Have to Do Is Beat Kentucky

If you’re looking for a scenario where Tennessee upsets Oklahoma, the most straightforward one goes something like this: the Vols use their star-studded offensive line to go right at Oklahoma’s inexperienced defensive line, and Eric Gray/Ty Chandler/player to be named later do the heavy lifting for Tennessee’s offense. The Sooners graduated three interior linemen, and defensive end Ronnie Perkins is still looking at a suspension; OU will be relying on a lot of (highly regarded) junior college talent right away. If Tennessee wants to help Jarrett Guarantano as much as possible, a strong running game can be his best friend, and Oklahoma’s rebuilding defensive line makes for an appealing early target.

This kind of gameplan isn’t just something that sounds good on paper. It’s one Jim Chaney is well-versed in. As Tim Jordan is no longer with the program, one of the biggest questions becomes, “Who else can help carry this kind of load?”

Chaney, like all good coordinators, adapts and evolves. We looked at his career between stops in Knoxville in our 2019 Gameday on Rocky Top preseason magazine, and republished that story on our site a few weeks ago. After lighting it up through the air with the Vols in 2012, Chaney leaned heavy on the ground game with just two backs at Arkansas in 2014. Jonathan Williams had 211 carries for 1,190 yards; Alex Collins had 204 for 1,100. That’s 16 carries per game for each; no one else on the roster had more than 31 carries the entire year.

In week three that season, Arkansas went to Texas Tech looking for its first power five win in two years. And the Razorbacks won 49-28, with Brandon Allen putting the ball in the air just 12 times. Collins had 27 carries for 212 yards, Williams 22 for 145, and Arkansas kept the ball for more than 40 minutes, punting once.

Tennessee’s current talent level is somewhere between that Arkansas team and Chaney’s second year at Georgia in 2017, when Jacob Eason was hurt in week one and the Dawgs needed to help Jake Fromm as much as possible. In a Top 20 showdown in Starkville in week four, Georgia announced their presence with authority in a 31-3 beat down. Fromm threw just 12 times, completing nine of them for 201 yards. He was able to put up those kind of numbers because Georgia ran it 42 times for 203 yards, with four different backs receiving at least seven carries.

Fromm’s stat line in Georgia’s 41-0 win in Knoxville the following week? Only 7-of-15 for 84 yards with a touchdown and a pick. But Georgia ran it 55 times for 294 yards, with five different backs receiving at least five carries. In the Cocktail Party, Fromm went 4-of-7 for 101 yards while Georgia ran for 292 more.

Tennessee’s backs have work to do to get in the same conversation with Nick Chubb and Sony Michel. But their carry distribution is noteworthy, even on such a successful run-heavy team: Chubb averaged 15 carries per game, Michel just 11, and the Dawgs supplemented them with 81 carries on the year for freshman D’Andre Swift, 50 from Elijah Holyfield, and 61 from Brian Herrien. Isaiah Wynn was a second-team All-American and first round draft pick at offensive tackle, but the whole of Georgia’s 2017 offensive line didn’t enter the season with the kind of expectations Tennessee’s 2020 line will inherit. So Eric Gray and Ty Chandler don’t have to be Chubb and Michel for this kind of thing to work.

And this kind of thing also allowed Jake Fromm to get better as the year went on. The Dawgs were successful pounding it this way early, and Fromm was at his best in the SEC Championship Game (16-of-22 for 183 yards and two touchdowns) and the playoff semifinal with Oklahoma (20-of-29 for 210 yards and two touchdowns). Guarantano certainly enters the year with higher expectations than Fromm did in 2017.

So, could Tennessee pull something like this off without Tim Jordan, or a breakout effort from a third back?

Last year Chaney and the Vols went with the hot hand: Ty Chandler averaged 10.4 carries per game, Tim Jordan 8.7, and Eric Gray 7.8. Jordan missed the BYU game (see Chandler’s numbers below), meaning on the year Chandler essentially got 40% of the carries, Gray and Jordan 30% each. And they each had a standout game:

• Ty Chandler vs BYU: 26 carries for 154 yards (5.9 ypc)
• Tim Jordan at Alabama: 17 carries for 94 yards (5.5 ypc)
• Eric Gray vs Vanderbilt: 25 carries for 246 yards (9.8 ypc)

Last season the Vols ran the ball 56.2% of the time (data via SportSource Analytics). Chaney’s 2017 Georgia offense ran it a whopping 68.7% of the time, though you’re certainly getting some fourth quarter blowout carries in there. The 32 passes Fromm attempted in the national title game were his season high. Brandon Allen, playing from behind far more often at Arkansas in 2014, averaged 26 passes per game.

Guarantano’s peak last fall included his best performance: after throwing it 40 times in the opener against Georgia State, he hit that number again at Missouri with 415 yards behind it. In 2018 the Vols were at their best with lower passing numbers as well: 32 attempts in the win at Auburn, just 20 in the win over Kentucky.

If Gray and Chandler stay healthy, the Vols may only need around five carries per game from someone else. Quavaris Crouch got seven short-yardage carries last season (for nine yards and two touchdowns, some straight up fullback stuff). Could the Vols got to him in those situations more often? Carlin Fils-aime is still on the roster. And local product Tee Hodge could get early opportunities as well.

Running it 56.2% of the time is about where the Vols have been the last four years, always between 56-59%. The 2015 team ran the ball 62.4% of the time, leading to plenty of, “Will they let Dobbs throw downfield?” questions this time four years ago. We already know they’ll let Guarantano do that. But if Tennessee elects to lean into the run behind their star-studded offensive line, Guarantano’s chances to go deep will increase. And it may be Tennessee’s best path to victory.