Category Archives: Football

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

So far, here’s where the Vols’ units have ranked in the SEC heading into the 2020 season:

• Quarterbacks, No. 4
• Running backs, No. 4
• Wide receivers, No. 10
• Offensive line, No. 2
• Defensive line, No. 2
• Linebackers, No. 8
• Defensive backs, No. 4

Today, we’ll look at special teams.

2020 SEC Special Teams Rankings

Additional comments

The Vols show up at No. 4 on this list thanks mostly to the return of their kickers. Brent Cimaglia made 85.2% of his field goal attempts last year and has never missed an extra point in 69 attempts. The guy is an excellent 77.4% over his three-year career so far and is improving every year. He has a chance to finish his Tennessee career with the best percentage in program history. Punter Paxton Brooks also returns after having averaged 42 yards per punt last season.

The return game is in a bit of a state of flux. Ty Chandler is back to return kicks, for whatever that’s worth in this age of fair catches on kickoffs, but the team will be looking for a full-time replacement for Marquez Callaway to return punts. I’m feeling pretty good about it being Eric Gray and him doing well with it.

Your thoughts

What do y’all think? Where did we get it right? Where are we wrong?

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.

So far, here’s where the Vols’ units have ranked in the SEC heading into the 2020 season:

• Quarterbacks, No. 4
• Running backs, No. 4
• Wide receivers, No. 10
• Offensive line, No. 2
• Defensive line, No. 2
• Linebackers, No. 8

Today, we’ll look at the defensive backs.

2020 SEC Defensive Back Rankings

Additional comments

A recurring theme for the Vols is that their defense ended up a Top 25 unit in 2019. The DBs were part of that, and although they have to replace Nigel Warrior this fall, he’s the only one. Also, it looks like the Vols better be able to run the ball in the SEC East this year. 🙂

Georgia, again, is at the top, as the Bulldogs return most of their secondary from a stellar defense in 2019. They’re on a level of their own.

The next five — Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas A&M, and LSU — are all bunched together. LSU may look low, but the Tigers’ defense wasn’t quite as good as some of the others, the pieces they lost are a little more painful (Grant Delpit, Kristian Fulton), and their recruiting for the unit was a bit behind the others. But it’s super close among all five of those teams. Tennessee, A&M, and LSU are all only separated by a total of 16 yards of projected defense.

Your thoughts

What do y’all think? Where did we get it right? Where are we wrong?

So far, here’s where the Vols’ units have ranked in the SEC heading into the 2020 season:

• Quarterbacks, No. 4
• Running backs, No. 4
• Wide receivers, No. 10
• Offensive line, No. 2
• Defensive line, No. 2

Today, we’ll look at the linebackers.

2020 SEC Linebacker Rankings

Additional comments

There’s not much to see here for Vols fans except to note that replacing Daniel Bituli and Darrell Taylor is probably Job One for the defense this season.

You may recall that we have Georgia’s defensive line ranked No. 1, too, adding fuel to our belief that as good as the Bulldogs’ defense was last year, it could be even better this year. It’s also interesting to note that Georgia’s sacks generally come from the ‘backers rather than the linemen.

Oh, and look. There’s Kentucky again.

Your thoughts

What do y’all think? Where did we get it right? Where are we wrong?

Tennessee’s “decade” of dominance from 1989-2001 created and sustained elite expectations in the Vols’ non-conference schedule. It started with UCLA, Notre Dame, a championship squad from Colorado, and Donovan McNabb’s Syracuse. In the early 2000’s the Vols added Miami off their national championship and Cal teams who entered the season with similar expectations, while renewing acquaintances with UCLA and Notre Dame. And in the last decade the Vols faced Oregon and Oklahoma home-and-home, plus a string of neutral site games including the Battle at Bristol.

Tennessee’s non-conference slate to open the 2020’s is a little lighter, some combination of the program’s fall and rotating leadership in the athletic department. The Vols still have Oklahoma (2020 and 2024) and Nebraska (2026-27) on the docket, but the other marquee match-ups are the return trip to BYU (2023) and the Johnny Majors Bowl with Pittsburgh (2021-22).

In the College Football Playoff era, power five teams are required to schedule another power five team as a non-conference opponent each year. The SEC allows Notre Dame, Army, and BYU to fulfill that requirement as well, so the Vols are set with the Cougars in 2023. What is now mandatory for the Vanderbilts of the world has been the expectation at Tennessee for 30+ years.

So it’s interesting and a little unsettling to see the holes in Tennessee’s non-conference scheduling just a few years down the road.

John Pennington at The Sports Source and Vince Ferrara at The Sports Animal did great work on Tennessee’s future non-conference scheduling compared to the rest of the SEC. Tennessee’s power five slate includes no dates beyond 2027, while other traditional powers in the league have not only announced games into the late 2030’s, but have begun scheduling two power five opponents much sooner than that. Alabama will open with Notre Dame and Ohio State in 2028.

So Tennessee’s scheduling needs some work, and the athletic department has to be in conversation about whether to add another power five foe towards the end of the decade if the Vols want to keep pace. But the Vols have a more immediate problem: there’s a power five hole in their 2025 slate.

With games being scheduled 15+ years in advance, an opening five years down the road is problematic; especially so when you consider most of the power five options have already filled their required slot for 2025. Of the 65 power five schools, only the Vols and six others don’t have another qualifying power five opponent on the non-conference docket in 2025. And one of those six others is Nebraska, who the Vols will face the following two seasons home-and-home. So in theory you could work out a triple-header and play a neutral site game in 2025, but there’s not really a good existing option between Knoxville and Lincoln. And if you wanted to just make it a four-game series, the Huskers don’t have another opening until 2032, so it seems unlikely we’d play three in a row from 2025-27 then wait another five years to finish the contract.

That leaves these five schools who the Vols could theoretically pick up the phone and call today to get something on the books for 2025. Scheduling info from the good folks at fbsschedules.com.

Open in 2025

• Maryland: no meetings since the disastrous 2002 Peach Bowl, nothing in Knoxville since 1975. They feel our pain on rapid coaching change, and are a grotesque 21-40 the last five years, with the move to the Big Ten offering little kindness. If Maryland is the option I found most interesting, you can see how this list is going to go. One problem here: Tennessee never schedules Big Ten teams. Like never. The Vols famously played Penn State in 1971-72, but they didn’t join the Big Ten until 1990. It’s in part, I’m sure, to the number of SEC/Big Ten bowl match-ups. But Tennessee’s first home-and-home with a team in the Big Ten when the game kicks off will be Nebraska in 2026.
• California: An all-time day at Neyland in 2006, and a high-scoring defeat at Berkeley in 2007. Our old friend Justin Wilcox enters year four at Cal having improved the Golden Bears from 5-7 to 7-6 to 8-5 his first three seasons.
• Northwestern: Tennessee and Northwestern have only met twice, both on January 1 against two of the most successful teams in Northwestern history. The Vols won those two games by a combined score of 93-34. Northwestern was steady under Pat Fitzgerald until last year’s 3-9 finish. A nice trip for any Chicagoland Vol fans, but again, the Vols don’t schedule Big Ten teams.
• Washington State: Peyton Manning’s first start back in 1994. The Vols and Cougars have met five times, but never in Pullman.
• Rutgers: Seems unlikely!

So you can see how it becomes problematic to wait this long to schedule a game.

Other options get thin from here. The Vols could take an easier out and pursue Army, though the Vols already have the Black Knights on the docket in 2022. Army has just two openings on their 2025 schedule. If you want to run it back with BYU, the Cougars do have four openings at the moment. The real prize going the independent route is Notre Dame, but the Irish only have two openings, and one will go to Stanford assuming that series is renewed. Notre Dame already has Arkansas and Texas A&M on the 2025 schedule as well, so it’s unlikely they’d go for a third SEC team.

But there are a couple of options if we think of this the other way around:

ACC Teams Facing Notre Dame in 2025

• NC State: two games in Raleigh before World War II, plus the night we met Cordarrelle Patterson in Atlanta, but the Wolfpack have never been to Knoxville. Would they add a second non-conference foe?
• Syracuse: The Orange do have Purdue and Notre Dame on their 2022 schedule, so they’re clearly open to the idea, but they lack any cupcake in 2025 with Notre Dame, UConn, and Army on the list already.

Teams Facing BYU in 2025

• Virginia: The Cavaliers are open to two qualifying opponents in the same season. In fact, they’ll play three (Illinois, BYU, Notre Dame) next fall. BYU is Virginia’s only non-conference opponent currently scheduled for 2025. Virginia makes the most football sense of the teams listed so far: three straight bowls and they won the ACC Coastal last season. Charlottesville is a decent drive. Scott Stadium is small at 64,000, but not impossibly so. This could also be a Chick-fil-A Kickoff match-up; those games are currently scheduled through 2024.
• Stanford: Intriguing, as the Cardinal are one of the best programs the Vols have never faced. They’re open to multiple qualifying opponents, and will face Kansas State, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame next season. If they renew the series with the Irish, would they say yes to BYU, Notre Dame, and Tennessee in 2025?
• Utah: This wouldn’t have sounded like an intriguing game in the 90’s, but the Utes have the football pedigree to make it so now. Three meetings in Knoxville, the last in 1984; the Vols have never been to Salt Lake City, though we are going to Provo in 2023.
• Minnesota: again, the Vols don’t schedule Big Ten teams.

Everything on this list is a better option than the teams that are totally free.

Are there any other ideas? As more teams start scheduling multiple power fives, more options become available. But most of the teams we typically think of as most desirable for a home-and-home – Texas, Ohio State, Michigan, Virginia Tech – aren’t playing two marquee games until later in the decade or into the 2030’s. Tennessee was atop the list of Virginia Tech’s most desirable non-conference opponents at The Athletic. But the earliest that could happen on Virginia Tech’s schedule is 2031.

I did find one interesting exception:

If you can’t play Virginia Tech for control of Appalachia…

• West Virginia: To their absolute credit, the Mountaineers are already willing and able to play two qualifying power five opponents, especially when one of them is a rivalry game. They’ve got Florida State in Atlanta and Maryland this season, then they start renewing Big East rivalries with Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh while also playing Penn State, giving them two qualifying opponents every year through 2024. But in 2025, they’ve only got Pittsburgh on the schedule so far. You’ll recall the 2018 meeting in Charlotte was the first ever between the Vols and Mountaineers, and poorly timed from a competitiveness perspective. It’s a 6.5 hour drive, but the Vols are already headed up that way for Pittsburgh.

To be sure, the Vols could have something completely different up their sleeve, or a bigger name could decide to take the plunge and make Tennessee their second qualifying opponent in 2025. But if those things don’t happen, and the Vols are looking at a list like this and a ticking clock, I’d make these phone calls in this order:

1. West Virginia home-and-home in 2025 and 2028 (or play them in Atlanta in 2025, but this series warrants the home-and-home)
2. Virginia in the 2025 Chick-fil-A Classic or home-and-home in 2025 and 2028
3. Utah home-and-home in 2025 and 2029
4. Stanford home-and-home in 2025 and 2030
5. California home-and-home in 2025 and 2030