If the Vols do meet their rounded-up FPI projection and turn 7.6 wins into an 8-4 regular season, then take what would be a pretty solid bowl victory? There’s a good chance Jeremy Pruitt’s second squad would finish the season in the Top 25. A pair of 9-4 finishes got the Vols a #22 final ranking in 2015 and 2016.

One thing stood out when researching pre-and-postseason polls in the media guide: since 1970, the Vols have only gone from unranked in preseason to ranked at the end of the year twice: SEC Championships in 1985 and 1989.

Some of it is the extremes of Tennessee’s history. Both in the last decade and the period that most mirrors it in the early 1980’s, the Vols had plenty of opportunity: Tennessee went unranked in the preseason poll from 1976-1985, but only got there at the end of the season in that magical ’85 campaign. And the Vols went unranked in the preseason poll from 2009-2014, but never capitalized on any of those opportunities.

After the SugarVols season in ’85, Tennessee was ranked in the preseason AP poll every year from 1986-2008 except one: 1989, when the Vols followed a 5-6 campaign in 1988 with an 11-1 season and a top five finish.

In this sense, we really haven’t seen the kind of year Jeremy Pruitt has a chance to create this fall. We’ve seen unranked-to-top-five, and we’ve seen it the other way around. But a season of significant but not meteoric progress, where the Vols went from unranked to a finish in the back end of the poll? That would be new.

Think of it this way: when’s the last time a Tennessee team overachieved?

In relative terms, I’d probably go with Derek Dooley’s first team in 2010, which finished 6-7 but, as we know, had outcomes overturned against LSU and North Carolina. The narrative of that season, with Tyler Bray’s arrival in November and competitive losses to good teams from LSU and South Carolina, built hope in the immediate aftermath of burning couches. As we also know, that kind of season is no promise of the future; Dooley wasn’t the guy. But other than that year, I’m not sure any of the post-Fulmer teams have ended a year better than we thought they’d be at its beginning.

Fulmer himself pulled it off multiple times, and was also here long enough to experience his share of underachieving. If you’re looking at pre-to-postseason AP poll data, here are the most significant leaps and falls since Johnny Majors got the Vols back in the national picture in the 1980’s:

Leaps

• As mentioned, the Vols started the season unranked in 1985 but won the SEC at 8-1-2, then throttled #2 Miami in the Sugar Bowl to finish #4. In 1989, the Vols lost only to Alabama and went from unranked to #5.
• The Majors-to-Fulmer transition year in 1992 featured a gain of +10 in the final poll. Tennessee began the year at #22, moved to #8 after Fulmer-led wins over #20 Georgia and #14 Florida, and rose as high as #4 as Majors returned from heart surgery in October. Three straight losses by nine total points knocked the Vols back to #23 and essentially ended Majors’ time, but a big win over #16 Boston College in the Hall of Fame (now Outback) Bowl ended Tennessee’s year at #12.
• The National Championship season in 1998 started at #10 and finished, you know, at #1, for a gain of +9. The only national champions who started farther back in the BCS/CFP era (via Wikipedia): Oklahoma in 2000 (#19), Ohio State in 2002 (#13), LSU in 2003 (#14), Auburn in 2010 (#22), and Florida State in 2013 (#11).
• In 1995 and 2001, the Vols went from top ten to top five. Peyton Manning’s sophomore team went from #8 to #3 (and #2 in the coaches’ poll), and Casey Clausen’s 2001 squad went from #8 to #4. Both were legitimate national championship contenders.

Falls

• Like the leap from unranked-to-top-five, the Vols also went top-five-to-unranked twice. A beat-up 2002 squad started #4 but exited the poll after their fourth loss to a Top 20 foe via #1 Miami and never returned thanks to Maryland in the Peach Bowl. And in 2005 the Vols started #3 but a quarterback controversy and five top ten opponents spelled doom, with the Vols out of the poll by November.
• The biggest fall after those? Butch Jones’ infamous 2016 season, which looks even worse in this context. The Vols started at #9, dropped to #17 after a near-miss with Appalachian State, then worked their way back there after a 5-0 start. They stayed there after a double overtime loss to #8 Texas A&M. But it all went downhill from there. The win over #24 Nebraska in the Music City Bowl got them back in the final poll at #22, but a -13 drop is the worst for any Tennessee team that both started and finished the season ranked in the modern era.
• The combination of injured quarterback and obvious rebuilding year created drops that were based as much on Tennessee’s name brand in the preseason poll as anything else. In 1994 the Vols started #13 and finished #22. And in 2000 the Vols started #13 and finished #25.
• A pair of nowhere to go but down years: the Vols were #2 in preseason polls in 1996 and 1999, but finished #9 both years.
• Phillip Fulmer’s final team in 2008 started the year at #18 but finished unranked.

No one is expecting or asking for Jeremy Pruitt to take the 2019 Vols from unranked to an SEC Championship (except Colin Cowherd, apparently). But a tangible sense of major progress, winning a couple games above your preseason expectation and living into the optimism this fanbase would eat up? I’m not sure we’ve ever had a year like that in my lifetime.

And man, it would be a lot of fun.

If you want a glimpse of what the Vols hope to look like in a couple years, wide receiver and linebacker are the best place to look: proven multi-year starters with NFL potential, and elite incoming freshmen who might play but don’t have to be the answer. Tennessee’s two highest-rated recruits in 2019 don’t fall into the latter category, as you’ll be seeing plenty of Wanya Morris and Darnell Wright right away on the offensive line. But after them, the next three highest-rated signees can learn from proven answers on the depth chart: Henry To’oto’o and Quavaris Couch at linebacker, and Ramel Keyton at wide receiver.

It makes sense to find Tennessee’s wide receivers and linebackers among the highest-rated units nationally. Phil Steele lists the Vol receivers as the 13th best group in the nation, and the linebackers 12th. But Tennessee’s highest-rated position group in his magazine is…special teams?

The Vol specialists are 10th in his preseason unit rankings. Some of this is bringing all the pieces back in Brent Cimaglia, Joe Doyle, Marquez Callaway and Ty Chandler. But a couple of those pieces were quietly impressive last season.

When you’re trying to rebuild, special teams can make a big difference in close games. But the Vols were so far behind last season, there really wasn’t much opportunity for special teams to matter. In fact, one of Cimaglia’s few misses last season came in the Auburn game.

If you lose six games by at least four possessions, special teams can’t help you. But if the Vols improve enough to find themselves in more competitive games this fall? Tennessee’s experience and expertise in the third phase can be the difference in winning and losing (see 2009 Alabama, 2013 South Carolina, etc.).

Last season doesn’t offer much context for special teams, but the rest of Tennessee’s decade does. Check out Cimaglia’s performance compared to other Vol kickers in the post-Fulmer era:

Or how about Marquez Callaway returning punts?

If what the Vols do in close games projects to be a major factor in the difference between 6-6 and 8-4, special teams has the potential to swing an outcome or two in Tennessee’s favor. The Vol specialists quietly had a strong year in 2018. In 2019, expect more opportunities to make some noise.

Vegas likes somewhere between 6.5 and 7 wins for Tennessee this fall, a good starting point for expectations. Advanced stats like S&P+ and FPI turned some heads earlier in the off-season when their initial projections slotted the Vols at 21st and 15th, respectively. But those are power rankings, which don’t take strength of schedule into account The real meat and potatoes of those systems are their projected win total; in S&P+, that’s 6.5 for the Vols (Bill Connelly’s preseason data for every team is available here).

But when FPI released their full projection for Tennessee late last week, their number for the Vols came in at 7.6. And we like to round up.

So you’ve got objective sources and systems putting the Vols somewhere between 6-6 and 8-4 this fall. That part sounds about right. But FPI’s win totals also paint what would be a very favorable bowl picture for Tennessee.

The FPI projected win totals from the top of the SEC down:

• Alabama: 11.0
• Georgia: 9.9
• LSU: 9.5
• Florida: 8.3
• Missouri: 8.1
• Mississippi State: 7.7
• Auburn: 7.7
• Tennessee: 7.6
• Texas A&M: 7.4

In our look at initial bowl projections in late May, we noted that the SEC has put 2.8 teams per year in the College Football Playoff and New Year’s Six. Last year that number jumped to four. With the Sugar Bowl not hosting a semifinal game this year, the highest-ranked non-playoff SEC team is guaranteed a spot there.

So, for instance, if both history and FPI’s projections hold, and the league sends Alabama, Georgia, and LSU to the playoff and New Year’s Six, then sends Florida to the Citrus Bowl? If Tennessee is one of a crowded field of teams at 8-4 in the group of six bowls, its history and its two-year absence from any bowl game will make the Vols a prime candidate for, say, the Outback Bowl. That would be a pretty good year for Jeremy Pruitt in 2019.

Here’s the thing about the difference between 6-6 and 8-4: it will almost certainly be what the Vols did in close games. And Pruitt didn’t get much practice at that last season. The Vols held off Auburn late, and couldn’t finish at South Carolina. But otherwise Tennessee wasn’t sweating out a final drive.

The previous coaching staff courted close games, while also struggling to manage them well. As the Vols make progress and become more competitive, Pruitt will have to learn on the fly with things like clock management, when to go for it on fourth down, etc. And he’ll have to learn how to manage his team after close wins and close losses with much more on the line than we saw at South Carolina last year.

Remember, an 8-5 finish including the bowl game would be the third-best season in the last 12 years, and better than any post-Fulmer coach did in year two. If the Vols have eight wins going into the bowl, as FPI projects? Recent history suggests the Vols will spend the holidays in a better location than we might be imagining right now.

Only 54 days to go. If you’re looking for a reason for your optimism to kick in, FPI is happy to give it to you.

The Fourth of July always feels like the turning point in college football’s long summer away. Tennessee’s basketball conversation lasted longer than ever this year, and will continue in some ways with multiple Vols in the NBA Summer League over the next several days. But now, everyone’s focus starts to make a hard shift to football. Saturday will be eight weeks to kickoff. Media Days are just a week and a half from now. It’s close enough to count.

We’ll get a good look at two of Tennessee’s September foes right away: Florida opens the entire season a week early against Miami on August 24, and BYU plays the late night opening Thursday game against Utah on August 29. The Utes should be somewhere in the Top 20 when polls are released, and is about a touchdown favorite at BYU. Depending on what else happens in college football’s first full weekend, the Cougars could slide into the Top 25 with an upset, but that seems less likely than not.

Florida, however, is showing up in the Top 10 in just about every preseason magazine. The Canes are no slouch – Phil Steele has them at #15 – and the game is in Orlando. But the Gators will almost certainly still be in the Top 25 when Tennessee comes calling at the end of September; they’d have to lose to both Miami and at Kentucky to not still be ranked by then.

That game opens another difficult stretch for Tennessee, though it is thankfully followed by an open date. The Vols will face Florida, Georgia, Mississippi State, and Alabama all in a row. If you’re looking for the chalk version of how Tennessee gets to 7-5, I’m not sure it includes wins in any of those games. The Vols could hit their Vegas number by getting all of their non-conference games, including BYU, returning to form against Kentucky and Vanderbilt, and beating South Carolina in Knoxville. That particular path would mean a 3-0 start, 0-4 middle, and 4-1 finish.

We’re more used to the 0-4 middle than we’d like to admit, in part because of who’s usually in that middle on our schedule. This could be the last time we see it, as the Vols and Georgia will see their annual rivalry move to November starting next fall. That’s good news for Tennessee, as the Vols have more or less played Florida and Georgia within a couple weeks of each other over the entire 27-year history of the SEC East. You can be essentially eliminated from the division chase by the first week of October that way. In the future, should Georgia continue to be a front-runner, Tennessee can at least carry hope, real or imagined, into November.

But for now, the Vols might face four consecutive ranked foes for the fourth time in eight years. Florida will almost certainly be there. Georgia and Alabama feel like locks, as usual; the Dawgs host Notre Dame two weeks before traveling to Knoxville, while Alabama has to go to Texas A&M the week before hosting Tennessee. But those are their only major threats before facing the Vols.

And then there’s Mississippi State. Last time the Vols and Bulldogs met was 2012, Derek Dooley’s final season. There are similarities between that schedule and this one: NC State and BYU are lower-level non-conference foes than what Tennessee normally faces, and if you’re picking which non-Alabama SEC West team you’d least like to face, the answer usually isn’t going to be Mississippi State. In what became Dooley’s final season, there was still plenty of, “We don’t lose to Mississippi State,” in the atmosphere. Since then, Dan Mullen took the Bulldogs to the New Year’s Six and another Top 25 finish in his final year in Starkville; Joe Moorehead followed up with a #25 finish in the coaches’ poll last year. Mississippi State may not carry the tradition and rivalry of Auburn or even LSU, but the Bulldogs are still in a much healthier place than Tennessee.

And their opening schedule – Louisiana-Lafayette, Southern Miss, Kansas State, Kentucky, and Auburn – means they could come to Knoxville 4-1 or even 5-0, making it four straight ranked foes for Tennessee.

The Vols faced four straight ranked foes in Derek Dooley’s final season, going 0-4 and losing any hope of escaping a coaching change. The following season the Vols faced five straight ranked foes, getting a win over South Carolina in a 1-4 stretch. And in 2016, the Vols beat Florida and Georgia before falling to Texas A&M and Alabama.

Four straight ranked foes often leads to four game losing streaks. The Vols suffered that fate every year from 2010-13, and again in 2017. But they also present opportunities for valuable, momentum-changing upsets; Jeremy Pruitt was able to get a pair of those last season.

The Vols might also get a fifth shot at a ranked foe. If we were in serious consideration for the SEC East this year, right now we’d be complaining about Missouri’s schedule: the Tigers catch Ole Miss and Arkansas out of the SEC West, and also host a rebuilding West Virginia in the non-conference. Missouri’s first eight games: at Wyoming, West Virginia, Southeast Missouri State, South Carolina, Troy, Ole Miss, at Vanderbilt, at Kentucky, followed by an open date. Then comes the fun part: at Georgia, Florida, then the Vols (who are coming off a bye week). The Tigers could build up enough momentum to be fairly high up the polls before facing the Dawgs, Gators, and Vols.

It’s easy to sit back in July and say how much one win or another would be worth, but it never works out exactly the way you think. Last July, beating Kentucky seemed like a reasonable goal. By November, it was a Top 15 feather in Jeremy Pruitt’s cap. What seems most likely is, perhaps for the last time, a brutal late September to mid-October gauntlet, and maybe another four game stretch of ranked opponents. But in Pruitt’s second year, there’s enough optimism to view it as opportunity.

A couple of years ago, I made the argument that cross-divisional games should not be considered equal to divisional games when determining divisional standings, and I believe that as much today as I did then. It makes all the sense in the world that we don’t count out-of-conference games against Bethune-Cookman when determining SEC conference standings, but for some reason we lose our minds if someone suggests that ranking teams within a division should be determined primarily by reference to divisional results. Cross-divisional results should be relegated to tiebreaker considerations.

Part of the reason for this idea being so quickly dismissed is the color of the shirt I’m wearing and that the issue tends to come up when discussing Alabama’s current dominance over Tennessee in the Third Saturday in October rivalry.

But using divisional results first to determine divisional champions would have impacted the Tennessee Volunteers a grand total of zero times this decade. In fact, the only beneficiaries of this proposal in that time span would have been Ole Miss in 2015 and South Carolina in 2011.

Here’s the data:

The only seasons (since 2010) that would have had different SEC championship participants under this proposal are 2015 and 2011. In 2015, Alabama represented the SEC West with a 7-1 overall conference record. Ole Miss was second in the West with a 6-2 overall conference record. But both teams were 5-1 in the SEC West, and Ole Miss beat Alabama head-to-head. The Rebels merely had the misfortune of losing to SEC East champion Florida in the regular season, which gave them an additional regular-season conference loss and denied them an opportunity for a rematch with the Gators in the SEC Championship game.

In 2011, Georgia represented the SEC East with a 7-1 overall conference record, beating out a 6-2 South Carolina team for the division crown. But the Bulldogs were 4-1 in the SEC East while the Gamecocks were 5-0. South Carolina beat everybody in the East, including Georgia, but they lost to Arkansas and Auburn from the West. Georgia, meanwhile, skated by with a cross-divisional slate that featured the two worst teams from the West in Mississippi State and Ole Miss.

It may look and smell like sour grapes from a long-suffering Tennessee fan, but giving cross-divisional results the same weight as divisional results when ranking teams within a division makes no sense, no matter the messenger.

You always start with the quarterback when doing the ominous summer piece on who you can least afford to lose. And Guarantano fits that bill, with unproven options behind him and untapped potential in front of him.

It’s more fun to think of this conversation in terms of replacement value. There are plenty of players we know will be valuable to the 2019 Vols, but many of the names that immediately come to mind play positions where depth is on Tennessee’s side: Marquez Callaway and Jauan Jennings, Alontae Taylor and Bryce Thompson, and maybe even Emmit Gooden and Aubrey Solomon. We also don’t know what version, if any, of Trey Smith we’ll get until we see him out there.

You have to look beyond Tennessee’s biggest names on offense, and many of them on defense. I do think you can make a case for Darrell Taylor; his eight sacks last year were the most for any Vol this decade other than Derek Barnett and Curt Maggitt, and his performance against ranked foes from Georgia and Kentucky definitely turned heads. Phil Steele lists him as the number four draft-eligible outside linebacker and a fourth-team All-American. The Vols are especially deep at linebacker, including some of their most exciting freshmen. But if Taylor simply proves to be that much better than the rest of that group, it’s good news for the Vols.

Still, I might through another name out there for most difficult to replace, at least in theory: Dominick Wood-Anderson.

The unrealistic expectations we tend to put on high-profile newcomers were just that for him last season: 17 catches for 140 yards and a pair of touchdowns. He was the number six option in the passing game last season. Likewise, the expectations we might have for Jim Chaney and tight ends may also be unfounded.

But if the Vols do find a spark getting Wood-Anderson involved this time around, it could get really thin behind him.

Tennessee’s only other returning reception by a tight end was a memorable one: Austin Pope against the Gators. I really want something good to happen to that kid. Behind him, it’s a bunch of unknowns, including four-star freshman Jackson Lowe.

The Vols might find something really good with Wood-Anderson this fall. If they do, he’ll instantly become one of the most valuable players on the team, in part because the options to replace him are so unproven.

Who else might be on the hardest-to-replace list?