We’ve been including a Top 25 in our Gameday on Rocky Top preseason magazine for a couple of years now. Last year, our biggest miss was Florida State (preseason No. 4), which lost its quarterback in the first game and finished only 7-6. We also missed on Michigan (preseason No. 15), Louisville (preseason No. 16), Texas (preseason No. 18), and West Virginia (preseason No. 20), and no team that we ranked outside of the Top 20 actually finished in the Top 25.

But . . . we actually did pretty well as far as these things go. Most of our Top 10 finished the season in the Top 12, and with the exception of FSU, those that didn’t weren’t too far off at No. 16 (Washington, preseason No. 8), No. 14 (Oklahoma State, preseason No. 9), and No. 18 (LSU, preseason No. 10).

Here’s our preseason Top 25 for the upcoming 2018 season, as we published it in the magazine but with some updated comments in italics.

1. Alabama Crimson Tide

Alabama seems to have developed an immunity to the kind of attrition that usually destroys other programs. Its inoculation is a cocktail of elite coaching and elite recruiting.

So yeah, there’s a competition at quarterback between Jalen Hurts, who got them to the national championship, and Tua Tagovailoa, who won it. [UPDATE: It’s looking like Tagovailoa is going to be the guy.] And they lose three starting receivers and a running back.

And yes, it’s even worse on defense. Yada, yada, yada.

But as always, there’s plenty of talent on the sideline, so they’ll not only be fine, they’ll thrive.

Saban does have a new offensive coordinator and will be entrusting his prized defense to the team’s third new defensive coordinator in four years, so if there’s a vulnerability, maybe it’s there.

But with Damien Harris at running back, a talented receiving corps, an experienced offensive line, and a defense as salty as ever, expect Alabama to hit a speed bump and then still arrive at College Football Playoff again anyway.

2. Ohio State Buckeyes

Urban Meyer has things rolling in Columbus, having won at least 11 games in each of his six seasons as a Buckeye. His challenge heading into the 2018 season is the same as it always is – find the right talent on the roster to replace the talent departing.

The greatest challenge this season is replacing quarterback J.T. Barrett, but the offensive line also loses two All-Americans, and the defense loses its share of guys, too.

The competition to replace Barrett is between Dwayne Haskins, Joe Burrow [UPDATE: Burrow is transferring to LSU], and Tate Martell, but Haskins appears to have the edge in the early running to take the reins as a sophomore. Whoever wins will have the luxury of a solid supporting cast with running back J.K. Dobbins and the top six receivers all returning.

This year’s schedule includes road trips to Penn State, Michigan State, and Purdue, and an out-of-conference contest with TCU. But the Buckeyes appear to be the favorites to win the Big 10 this fall.

3. Clemson Tigers

Like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney is quickly becoming a master of managing team attrition by way of elite recruiting. He’s having to contend with early departures to the NFL again this year, but his cupboard is well-stocked.

The best news for Swinney, though, is that his offense doesn’t require much re-stocking this fall. Quarterback Kelly Bryant returns, as do running backs Travis Etienne and Tavien Feaster. The receiving corps may be the best in the nation, with Hunter Renfrow, Tee Higgins, and Amari Rodgers all returning. The offensive line is missing three starters, but Mitch Hyatt is back to keep things under control.

The defense will have to re-tool a bit, but it will do so around star defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence.

The schedule includes road trips to Florida State and out-of-conference opponent Texas A&M, but isn’t particularly problematic, and Clemson is the favorite to win its fourth consecutive ACC title this season.

4. Georgia Bulldogs

In Kirby Smart’s second year, he had his Georgia Bulldogs team just one play away from winning it all, but what they couldn’t finish on the field, they finished on the recruiting trail, knocking Alabama out of the top spot in the recruiting rankings.

Nick Chubb and Sony Michel are gone, but Georgia stands ready to unleash a three-headed monster at running back in D’Andre Swift, Brian Herrien, and Elijah Holyfield. Jake Fromm is back at quarterback, and although they lose receiver Javon Wims, they return Terry Godwin and Mecole Hardman.

On defense, the Bulldogs will miss Butkus Award Winner Roquan Smith and a bushel full of other terrific players, but can choose their replacements from among a large group of talent.

The Bulldogs have questions, but they also have answers, so we expect Georgia to represent the SEC East in Atlanta again this fall.

5. Washington Huskies

Chris Petersen’s Huskies have won 10 and 12 games each of the past two seasons and seem like they could take that final step into greatness this fall.

Any departures from last year’s team are offset by the return of Jake Browning, who is back for his senior season as a four-year starter. He’ll be joined by running back Myles Gaskin, who’s had three consecutive 1,000-yard seasons, and fellow back Salvon Ahmed. The receiving corps returns Chico McClatcher and tight end Hunter Bryant, and the line returns Trey Adams.

On defense, the key guys returning include linebacker Ryan Bowman, cornerback Byron Murphy, and safety Taylor Rapp.

The Huskies open the season against non-conference opponent Auburn, which will be an intriguing game for both teams, and they get Stanford at home. Expect Washington to be the Pac-12 team most likely to compete for a spot in the College Football Playoff this season.

6. Oklahoma Sooners

Oklahoma really couldn’t have asked for much more out of Lincoln Riley’s first year replacing the legendary Bob Stoops as the Sooners’ head coach. Maybe you’d want a bit more defense, but losing in double-overtime in the College Football Playoff Semifinal in your first season is not bad.

Now, though, Riley is going to have to do it without quarterback Baker Mayfield and lineman Orlando Brown. The role of Mayfield will now be played by Texas A&M transfer Kyler Murray. He’ll be joined by running backs Rodney Anderson and Trey Sermon, receivers Marquise Brown and CeeDee Lamb, and three starters along one of the nation’s best offensive lines.

The defense loses Big 12 Co-Defensive Player of the Year Ogbonnia Okoronkwo as well as several other key players, but they have capable guys ready to step up.

The Sooners open the 2018 season against Lane Kiffin’s FAU squad and then host UCLA before commencing conference play. They are the favorites to win the Big 12.

7. Miami Hurricanes

Most expected Mark Richt to have success as the head coach at Miami, but few believed he would find it in his first season. Despite finishing with three consecutive losses last year, Richt’s team finished first in the ACC Coastal division and challenged Clemson for the ACC title. They could be even better this year, as they return a great deal of talent from last year’s squad.

The offense loses a few key pieces but returns quarterback Malik Rosier this fall, and he’ll be joined in the backfield by running backs Travis Homer and Lorenzo Lingard. The Hurricanes should also get receiver Ahmmon Richards back from injury.

Miami kicks off the 2018 season with a huge game at Jerry World against the LSU Tigers. They also have a late road trip to play the Virginia Tech Hokies, but the rest of the schedule is quite manageable. They’re probably still a recruiting class or two away from catching Clemson for the ACC title, but they are well on their way.

8. Auburn Tigers

Auburn nearly lost head coach Gus Malzahn to Arkansas last season, but upped the ante to keep him. Good thing, too, because they’re going to need him this fall.

The Tigers beat both Georgia and Alabama last year but got left out of the playoff when they lost the rematch to the Bulldogs. Heading into 2018, they have to replace some key guys, as the NFL has swooped in to snatch up running backs Kerryon Johnson and Kamryn Pettway, linebacker Jeff Holland, and defensive back Carlton Davis.

The Tigers are fortunate to have quarterback Jarrett Stidham back, though, and he’s fortunate to have most of his receiving corps return. Kam Martin takes over at running back for Johnson and Pettway.
Auburn’s toughest conference games are all on the road this fall, as they have to travel to take on Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi State. They also added a tough out-of-conference game with Washington this season.

All of that will make it a challenge for the Tigers in 2018.

9. Notre Dame Fighting Irish

The Fighting Irish finished the 2017 season with a 10-3 record, but a 2-2 November headlined by an embarrassing loss to Miami really seemed to put a damper on the season.

Now, they head into 2018 with several challenges. The team must replace two standout linemen in Quenton Nelson and Mike McGlinchey. Also gone are running back Josh Adams, receiver Equanimeous St. Brown, and defensive coordinator Mike Elko.

It’s not all bad news for Notre Dame, though. Quarterback Brandon Wimbush returns, as does Ian Book, who will compete with him for the starting position. Whoever wins the job, he’ll have a talented group of receivers to throw to, provided the new offensive line can give them time to connect.

Notre Dame opens the season against Michigan and also has games scheduled with Virginia Tech, USC, and Florida State. They could get 10 wins again this season, but they’ll have to solve their issues in the trenches first.

10. Wisconsin Badgers

Paul Chryst’s Wisconsin team is a model of consistency, regularly winning the Big Ten West and competing with Ohio State for the conference title. If they could only take care of business in the championship game, they’d be positioned for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

The Badgers have to re-tool their defense this season, but nearly everybody is back on offense. Leading the way is quarterback Alex Hornibrook and a wide receiving corps featuring Quintez Cephus, A.J. Taylor, Danny Davis, and Kendric Pryor. The passing game will be complemented by the return of running back Jonathan Taylor fresh off an excellent first season. In all, the offense returns 10 of 11 starters.

The defense has more of a challenge heading into this season, as it loses two ends, two linebackers, and three defensive backs. But standout linebacker T.J. Edwards returns.

With most of the rest of the Big Ten firepower residing in the East, Wisconsin has a relatively easy path to the Big Ten championship game. Continue reading “Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 preseason Top 25”

The Vols have picked up another grad transfer, and this one’s a big one. VolQuest’s Austin Price is reporting that former Alabama Crimson Tide offensive lineman Brandon Kennedy has officially decided to play for Tennessee.

Kennedy is apparently already in Knoxville, and he’s expected to enroll at UT sometime this summer. He has two years of eligibility remaining and should be in the mix to start at either center or guard this fall.

According to his profile on Alabama’s roster (still up as of this writing), Kennedy is 6’3″ and 314 pounds, and he was the team’s backup center last year until a season-ending foot injury derailed his season. He played in three games last year and seven games in 2016.

As a recruit, Kennedy was a 4-star prospect in the Class of 2015, and 247Sports ranked him as the nation’s No. 19 offensive guard. His top five offers were from Clemson, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, and Virginia Tech.

Kennedy’s name was mentioned often this past spring as the coaches and league debated the graduate transfer rules. During the spring meetings in Destin, the coaches voted to amend the rule requiring grad transfers to sit out for a year if transferring within the conference. That paved the way for Kennedy to choose between Tennessee and Auburn, and he ultimately chose the Vols.

 

Two 10-year-olds – Bubba and Goober – are shooting hoops. Bubba beats Goober, and both want to stay outside to practice to be ready for another game tomorrow. But the kids’ dad, Mr. Mayberry, intervenes. Bubba, as a reward for winning, can stay outside to practice, but Goober has to go to the house.

Goober wants to get better, so he’s out there practicing every single second that Bubba is, except that he is required to sit out Bubba’s extra post-win practices. Bubba gets more. Bubba gets better, Goober goes home.

The college football postseason practice rules

Weird, but true. This is how Mr. Mayberry operates the college football postseason.

The NCAA rules, as you’d expect, are pretty detailed when it comes to practice time for student-athletes. The rules allow bowl teams to continue practicing until their last game, and although the NCAA is currently stressed from multiple angles due to having to defend its non-profit status while many individuals, institutions, and companies make countless millions at the expense of the actual talent (whew, pardon that unexpected mini-rant), it’s not governed by dumb people. You can’t send a team to a bowl game and tell them they can’t practice for it. So yeah, teams get to keep practicing as long as they’re still playing games. That makes sense. Good job, NCAA.

But everybody else has to go home. Wait, what?

How much extra practice time do bowl teams get? You’ll often hear that they get 15 extra practice sessions, but the rules are actually more nuanced than that. Bowl teams are allowed to practice up to four hours per day or 20 hours per week between the end of the regular season and the bowl game, and so that time period actually dictates how many extra practices they can squeeze in.

Does the extra practice really matter? Yeah, it does. A lot. For one thing, bowl practices are generally not exclusively devoted to preparation for the extra game. Most coaches treat at least a portion of the extra practice time as an extra spring camp. They use the time to develop younger players who haven’t received as much attention due to the demands of the regular season. In essence, teams devote a significant portion of the extra practice to preparing for the following season. The extra developmental time is especially valuable because it comes during a period that student-athletes are between semesters, so they can really focus on what they’re being taught on the field without additional demands and divided attention. Bottom line: It’s not just extra practice time for the current season, it’s a head start on the next.

In contrast, non-bowl teams are prohibited from engaging in the same kind of practice. They don’t have to just sit and stare at the wall, but they are limited to only eight hours per week and the only activities they’re allowed to participate in are weight-lifting, conditioning, and two hours of film study.

Being restricted to eight hours of limited activities while your rivals get advanced preparation for the following season is a major disadvantage for non-bowl teams. They’ve already lost the current season, and now they have to stand at the start line while the same teams that beat them this year sprint out of the gates early for the next race.

Look, this is football, a physically and mentally demanding game that results in winners and losers. Losers don’t become winners by complaining about the rules or the challenges they face; they do whatever they can to overcome those challenges. They don’t get to complain.

But Mr. Mayberry isn’t a participant; he’s the Gamemaker, and it’s his job is to level the playing field to create an equitably competitive environment.

Experience matters (and feeds itself)

It’s a truth that is practically self-evident: experience matters. The more you do something, the more you’re going to improve. It’s why we devote long hours to weight-lifting and film study and nutrition and recruiting and practice and a whole host of other things. It’s why playing in more games, and playing in more high-stakes games, makes a team better. All else being equal, more experienced teams will generally beat less experienced teams.

And barring some catastrophe (See, e.g., Tennessee, Nebraska, Michigan, etc.), more experienced teams enjoy a virtuous feedback loop that continues to extend their seasons (and their extra practice sessions) year after year.

Below is a table of the number of games played over the past five years for each SEC team:

 

The regular season in college football is 12 games. If you’re good enough, you can extend your season to over a month’s worth of 20-hour weeks by qualifying for a bowl game. That would put your season total of games played to 13, 14 if you also played in your conference championship. If you’re especially good, your bowl game is part of the College Football Playoff, and you can extend your season yet one more week and your games played to 14 or even 15 games. Only one or two teams each year hit that magical six-week, 15-games postseason number. About half are stuck at the usual 12-games-in-13-weeks regular-season mold, with the other near-half getting 13 games and somewhere around an extra five weeks of postseason work.

As you can see from the table above, most SEC teams (all but Florida, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt) earned at least one postseason game more often than not over the past five years. Tennessee, Ole Miss, LSU, and Arkansas all got an extra game three out of the last five seasons. South Carolina did it four times. Texas A&M and Mississippi State each earned an extra game every season, but neither of them ever earned more than one. Missouri is a weird case in that it got to the postseason only three of five times, but got two extra games two of those three times.

And then there’s Alabama, Auburn, and Georgia. All of them made the postseason all five years. Georgia earned more than one extra game only once, but it was a six-week, 15-game season. Auburn earned more than one extra game twice, both 14-game seasons.

And Alabama earned at least two extra games four out of the past five years, and they have two six-week, 15-game seasons. Over the past five years, they’ve played four more games than anyone else in the conference, an average of almost one entire game per season. They average 1.6 games more per season than half the league.

Translating that into extra practice time, in 2013 and 2014, Alabama’s season didn’t end until the first week of January, meaning they had nearly five extra weeks of practice time available. A lot of teams got that. But from 2015-17, they also played in the national championship, so they’ve had one additional week of practice each of the past three seasons as well.

So what?

There’s nothing wrong with some teams playing more games than others in any given season. Good teams should advance into postseason play, and the best teams should advance the furthest. And if you’re playing games, you need to practice.

But allowing good teams to practice while also forcing bad teams not to does give good teams an enduring advantage in terms of experience, an advantage that not only allows them to prepare for the remaining games in the current season but also gives them a head start on the next.

College football isn’t Mario Kart, where the worst players get more of the best weapons to make the game more exciting. In competition, there must be a reward for playing well. Good teams shouldn’t be intentionally subjected to additional risk just because they’re good and we want more competitive games. It’s up to the bad teams to make that happen by getting better.

But while the Gamemaker shouldn’t make things more difficult for the best players, they also shouldn’t make things even more difficult for the worst. What rationale justifies a rule requiring bad teams not to get better?

I can think of no good reason to require teams to quit practicing at different times. They should all be allowed to practice from the beginning of the season to the final whistle of the final game played by any team in the FBS. I’d think that’d be something that even Mr. Mayberry could get behind.

 

I used to play this game with my kids when we were traveling. Like most kids relegated to the back seat for long car trips, they would inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” When my patience waned, I would get creative just for my own sanity.

“I have bad news, kids. We’re not going to get there today. In fact, we will never get there. Because as soon as we get there, it won’t be there anymore. It’ll be here.”

That bought me at least another five minutes of peace while they processed the message. Hey, you take whatever amusement you can get on a 16-hour drive from the Tri-Cities to the frozen tundra of Minnesota.

What’s that have to do with Tennessee football? I’ll let you figure that out for yourself. It’s a long summer.

“Best meaningless games”

A couple of weeks ago, SI.com published an article entitled The Best Meaningless Games of the 2017 College Football Season. The piece caught my eye, of course, because Tennessee’s season-opener against Georgia Tech made the list, but I found it especially interesting for another reason entirely.

The use of the two-word phrase “best meaningless” presupposes two kinds of games: (1) those that are “meaningful” in that they in some way impact the race for a championship, and (2) those that don’t and yet have some value anyway.

Categorizing football games like that suggests that there are two primary things we’re watching and hoping for when the season kicks off: The Race and The Moments. One, however, is threatening to eat the other.

The Race

The ultimate goal of every team’s season, of course, is to win it all. We enter the season hoping our team will become the national champion. Failing that, a conference or divisional championship makes a nice consolation prize. We root for our team to not only win the games it plays but also to finish the season ahead of everyone else in the standings.

This is The Race. It’s awesome (if memory serves), because every game matters, and not just your own. Win any given Saturday, and on Sunday you’re checking your stride, your pace, your standing with respect to everyone else still in the hunt for the championship. Lose, and you start rooting for those ahead of you in the standings to stumble as well so that you can catch up. Each week, the pack of contenders thins out until there is only one remaining on the podium hoisting the trophy.

The Race adds a layer of excitement to the college football season. Unfortunately, it is reserved for the elites, those teams with some degree of reasonable expectation that they can contend with the others for the crown.

The Moments

There are other reasons to watch college football as well, and they can be either in addition to The Race or entirely independent of it. The college football season provides each team an opportunity to create Moments that make watching worthwhile.

Take Rivalry Week, for instance. The last week of the regular season each year is one of the best of the entire fall because it features games that matter for reasons that might be completely independent of The Race: Alabama-Auburn, Georgia-Georgia Tech, Clemson-South Carolina, Oregon-Oregon State, Washington-Washington State, Arizona-Arizona State, BYU-Utah, Florida-Florida State, Kentucky-Louisville, Michigan-Ohio State, just to name a few. Some of those games will impact The Race, but many will not, and they are all important to their respective fan bases. These kinds of games provide Moments worth watching even for teams no longer in contention for a championship.

Moments worth watching can arise out of other contexts as well. Close, dramatic games usually make the networks’ evening highlight reels for a reason, namely because they make for good stories to tell. That’s the reason last year’s Tennessee-Georgia Tech game made SI.com’s list of “best meaningless games” of the 2017 season. It was a back-and-forth event that was sent to overtime by a blocked field goal attempt and was ultimately decided by a single play in double overtime. Dramatic games make shorten your life expectancy, but they make for good Moments.

Moments worth watching can also occur in non-rivalry, non-dramatic games that don’t impact The Race. These include individual highlights in the form of athletic, acrobatic, ESPN Top 10-type plays that make you glad you saw them live.

The Impact of The Race on The Moments

Fans of teams that are actively engaged in The Race have it easy. They have legitimate expectations of competing for the crown, and, in addition, they’ll have the extra benefit of some memorable Moments along the way.

Fans of teams not in contention for The Race only have the Moments, but first they must decide how to process the irrelevancy of The Race.

The over/under for the Vols this fall is 5.5, meaning the experts think the team should win between five and six games. If correct, that win total will keep Tennessee out of contention for any kind of championship, whether it be national, conference, or divisional. It will make The Race irrelevant.

And it will likely do so swiftly. According to one source, the Vols are currently a 9.5-point underdog to season-opening opponent West Virginia. If that’s accurate, they’ll suffer a loss right out of the gate, and wins against ETSU and UTEP the following weeks will gain them no ground. Then comes a stretch of games against Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, and South Carolina that will likely result in a record of between 2-6 and 4-4, not exactly a championship resume. The Race will be run, but the Vols won’t be in contention.

For Tennessee fans interested only in The Race, their college football season will be over the day it begins.

Ugh. That doesn’t sound fun at all, but what’s the alternative?

There’s a Ted Talk from a guy named Matt Killingsworth that stands for the proposition that people who live in the moment are happier than those who don’t. He conducted a survey through an app that randomly pinged users to ask them a series of questions: How are they feeling at that moment? What were they doing at that moment? Were they thinking about something else at that moment? And if yes to the last question, was the thing they were thinking about pleasant, unpleasant, or neither?

After 650,000 responses, what he found was that our minds tend to wander from the moment 47% of the time, and when they did, participants were less happy than if they remained in the moment.

It wasn’t just that folks also tended to think about unpleasant things when they lived outside the moment, although that was true. The results were more surprising than that. Participants were unhappier even when they were already unhappy in the moment and daydreaming of something pleasant. In other words, what they thought about while mind-wandering mattered – thinking unpleasant things made them much unhappier than thinking about pleasant things – but mind-wandering always resulted in an unhappier state when compared to living in the moment. Killingsworth likened it to playing a slot machine where you could lose $50, $25, or $1. You’d never play that game.

Mind-wandering and college football

How might this apply to the context of college football? Might it be true that we spend half our time foregoing the moment and mind-wandering to The Race? Is it making us happier? Alabama fans might not even notice. In keeping with the slot machine illustration, they may be losing only $1. But Tennessee fans? Dwelling on The Race could be costing us 50 bucks a pop.

The same phenomenon that occurs within the context of an entire season may also happen within the context of any given game. Does thinking we know the outcome of the game before it starts negatively impact our ability to enjoy it? Do we think we’ll win? Know we’ll lose? Do these thoughts cause us to miss Moments?

No doubt, fans have a legitimate reason to be presently unhappy about a bad play, a bad loss, or a bad season. But if Killingsworth is right, entertaining unpleasant thoughts about the future impact of those things only makes it worse.

There is a time for considering and planning for the future, and there is a time for living in the moment. But the slot machine apparently costs either $1 or $50. We should probably figure out which, and only then decide whether playing is worth the cost.

We’re all daydreaming of the day that Jeremy Pruitt and Phillip Fulmer get the Vols back to running, and winning, The Race.

We don’t know when that moment will arrive, but we do know that it is sometime in the future.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re never going to get there. Because as soon as we get there, we’ll be here.

Where will our minds be?

 

“Worst” is subjective, of course. When we did this eight years ago at Rocky Top Talk, “most heartbreaking” was the language we chose. As I wrote Wednesday, turns out heartbreak is also subjective. It doesn’t feel right to tag the toughest losses of the last decade with heartbreak, because that’s typically reserved for stakes bigger than the Vols have played for since 2007. We’ll just go with worst; I’m taking into consideration both how it felt at the time and how it feels today. Here are my picks for the ten worst losses during Tennessee’s decade-long struggle:

10. 2017 Florida

When Tyrie Cleveland caught that pass, I laughed. I don’t think I’ve ever had that reaction to a Tennessee loss before, especially not one on the final play of the game. But this game felt like the summation of everything the Vols had struggled with under Butch Jones: overly infatuated with a close game, an inability to create a successful offensive snap in a crucial situation despite multiple chances, Florida snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. There are more colorful examples of all three further up the list. The ending here felt both unexpected and appropriate. And ultimately, as the 2017 season faded into 4-8 infamy, this loss didn’t matter as much. It wasn’t the difference between success and failure, or Jones keeping his job. It hurt plenty in the moment, but was simply the first chapter of a story we were already dreading.

9. 2008 UCLA

When you wait all summer for college football and your team is coming off an SEC East title, it hurts real bad to lose on opening night. Especially when the other team throws four interceptions in the first half. No one needs to hear me talk about the Clawfense any more; the numbers from this box score (Crompton 19-of-41, Foster & Hardesty 162 yards on only 25 carries) are burned in my brain. The beginning of the end.

8. 2014 Florida

Josh Dobbs is the reason this game doesn’t rank higher for me. He changed the narrative of the 2014 season and the trajectory of the program against South Carolina later that year, one of the most endearing and enduring victories of these last ten seasons. But on this day, Tennessee had seven snaps inside the Florida 20 in the third quarter, and none of them gained a single yard. Two field goals and an interception later, a 3-0 lead was only 9-0, and as we all remember, that wasn’t enough.

7. 2016 South Carolina

This season is still exhausting to think about. The range of emotions from the end of the Georgia game, through the end of the Texas A&M game (the kind of game that definitely makes the list when the Vols are consistently good around it), through getting decimated by Alabama…to this loss. From “team of destiny!” to a defeat that was actually encouraging against A&M, to chalking it up to injuries and Alabama while still having tangible success in front of you…and then it was simply all gone at South Carolina. A steep fall indeed, one Jones wouldn’t recover from.

6. 2015 Oklahoma

Despite the frustrating loss to Florida in 2014, the program was trending in the right direction and Oklahoma was the golden opportunity for Tennessee to announce its return to the national landscape. And man, it felt like that was happening at halftime. But in the third quarter, Tennessee had four drives featuring a 1st-and-10 at their own 44 or better. And those four sequences featured no gains greater than one yard. One missed field goal, three punts, and some heroics from Baker Mayfield later, and the Sooners stole the victory as the Vols blew a three-possession lead for the first time in almost 30 years.

5. 2010 LSU

4. 2010 North Carolina

Remember when these two happened and we thought they would represent the worst things would get for a long time? Eight years later, I think the North Carolina one is worse. Not only did we think we had won for a longer period of time, the LSU screw-up was our fault for having a billion men on the field. The UNC loss can still be blamed in part on the referee not standing over the ball while the Tar Heels substituted, and now college football has the Derek Dooley rule to prevent such a thing from happening again. The unique experience of celebrating a victory before ultimately losing twice in one season is enough to keep these two in the top five.

3. 2011 Kentucky

I can excuse 2008 Wyoming for a number of reasons, and losses like 2017 Georgia or plenty to Alabama can be chalked up to, “They were a lot better than us.” But this one, to me, still stands out. 4-7 Kentucky with a wide receiver playing quarterback and 217 yards of offense broke a 26-year winning streak for Tennessee in this series, costing the Vols bowl eligibility and Derek Dooley almost all the goodwill he had left.

2. 2012 Florida

Perhaps not one you think of right away when going back through the last ten years. But if I’m thinking back to the way I felt at the end of the game? There’s been little worse than this: all the Fulmer-Kiffin-Dooley stuff, back in the Top 25 for the first time since the slide began, and more than anything, the fragile hope that the 2012 team could actually get us back. Midway through the third quarter, it felt like it was going to happen. And then: 80-yard touchdown, interception, 45-yard gain, 23-yard touchdown, Florida up 27-20, and a few drives later a 75-yard touchdown was added on for good measure. Walking out of that stadium I remember very clearly thinking two things: this team won’t be the one to get us back, and now we’re going to have to wait at least three more years to try. I haven’t written after terrible losses because of my grandmother’s death (2016 South Carolina) or our son’s birth (2017 Georgia). But this is the only loss I remember not writing anything for because it simply felt like there was nothing to say except, “We’re going to have to wait another three years.”

1 2015 Florida

We’ll talk in a moment about where this game goes on a list of most heartbreaking losses beyond these last ten years. But within the last ten years, this one, by far, is at the top for me. Beyond the streak and the individual madness of 4th-and-14 are the failures on both sides of the ball. You’ve got multiple fourth down conversions allowed, infamously not going for two, and a final drive after 4th-and-14 when Tennessee had two timeouts and 1:26 but somehow ran only five plays before settling for a 55-yard field goal attempt. And of all the losses on this list, this one was by far the most costly. 2016 South Carolina might have cost the Vols the East. But we know this one did, in a year when Tennessee took two playoff teams to the wire. If any one of a dozen things goes differently in this game, Tennessee breaks the streak a year early, and Josh Dobbs and company get their rings and another shot at Alabama. But alas.

Where would we put any of these on a longer list? Using our 2010 list of the worst losses from 1990-2009, I’d add only one to that Top 10. But I would put 2015 Florida way up there:

Worst Losses 1990-2017

1. 2001 LSU (SEC Championship)
2. 1990 Alabama
3. 2015 Florida
4. 2001 Georgia
5. 1999 Arkansas
6. 2000 Florida
7. 1993 Alabama (tied)
8. 1996 Memphis
9. 2007 LSU (SEC Championship)
10. 1995 Florida

Three years later, I think 2015 Florida is worse than the Hobnailed Boot. This is mostly because the Hobnailed Boot didn’t hurt us in the end: if not for the number one game on that list, the Vols are playing for the BCS Championship despite the loss to Georgia.

That’s our list. What’s yours?