A few more observations on this fine Sunday: This was Tennessee’s biggest win as an underdog since Florida in 2001. Covers.com has the closing line from that night in The Swamp at +16.5. The line closed at +14.5 yesterday, just ahead of other classic upsets like 2003 Miami (+12.5) and […]

So I allowed myself to dream this week, and went back to read what we wrote when Butch Jones and the 2013 Vols beat #11 South Carolina in his first season. Much has changed since then: the full buy-in language of five years ago reflected the exhaustion of trying to […]

It’s been ten years since the Vols played at Auburn, one of the best arguments for policy change in SEC scheduling. We faced the Tigers every year from 1956-1991, the series becoming Tennessee’s second-biggest rivalry during that time. Now we have to wait a decade to travel to each other’s […]

So the ingredients are there, right? Sleepy 11:00 am local kickoff, preseason Top 10 team sitting at a disappointing 4-2, offense looking sluggish…plus the underdog Vols coming off a bye, new head coach with plenty of experience against this particular opponent looking for his first big win. We can talk […]

It will not surprise you to find (via data from Sports Source Analytics) the Vols are still near the bottom in running the football in the first quarter: 46 carries for 74 yards, a robust 1.61 yards per carry. That first quarter average is 128th nationally (good news: Charlotte is 130th). […]

Last year my wife and I brought our firstborn home from the hospital the day Tennessee played Georgia, the best of all ways to not be thinking about the game. “Did we really fumble it right back to them? Hey, he peed on the floor!” But from there, I’d imagine […]

(This is a real list!) It’s not easy to measure progress when you’ve taken a pair of 26-point losses to teams you talked yourself into beating leading up to game week. It’s only Friday, but I don’t think many of us are talking ourselves into much against Georgia. But it’s […]

I don’t know if the Florida series just feels like it’s full of weirdness to us because they’ve won around three-out-of-four times we’ve faced each other since 1990 and, of course, all but one of them since 2004. I think about some of the ways we beat Kentucky over the […]

In spite of everything – coaching changes, 4-8, a 26-point loss to West Virginia, Florida’s loss to Kentucky – this still feels like the Friday morning of Florida week is supposed to feel. The slow burn of anticipation has taken us to the end of the work week and, for […]

It seems fair to say Tennessee isn’t asking Jarrett Guarantano to do too much so far. He only attempted 25 passes despite trailing all day against West Virginia. And the Vols didn’t seek to step on the gas to create additional separation from UTEP on the scoreboard, thus Guarantano attempted […]