Tennessee takes the stage in Atlanta today, and the media will unveil their picks for the 2018 SEC standings before the week is out. Georgia should be the overwhelming favorite in the SEC East coming off a near-miss in the national championship game and the number one recruiting class of 2018. How the rest of the division shakes out will be of interest to Tennessee, and not just this season.
This is an era Tennessee fans of my age (36) and younger are unaccustomed to. Georgia hasn’t won the SEC in consecutive years since the Herschel Walker days in the early 1980’s. The Dawgs have two sets of back-to-back division titles (2002-03 and 2011-12), but both times the second year came via a tiebreaker. Tennessee fans who grew up familiar with Georgia playing third fiddle have never seen a Bulldog program consistently on top the way they’ll have a chance to be in 2017, 2018, and beyond.
And the gap between one and two is substantial. Their traditional contemporaries at Florida and Tennessee changed coaches. Missouri seems due for an up year on the field, but is yet to level up in recruiting. Kentucky and Vanderbilt have yet to shed their reputations under their current administrations. Will South Carolina be the #2 pick in this year’s SEC East?
That idea may also seem foreign to those of us holding on tightly to Tennessee’s glory days in the 1990’s. But the truth is it’s not just South Carolina, but the vast majority of the SEC that’s been better than Tennessee the last ten years:
SEC Overall Records 2008-2017
| Team | Wins | Losses | Pct. |
| Alabama | 125 | 14 | .899 |
| LSU | 95 | 34 | .736 |
| Georgia | 95 | 39 | .709 |
| Florida | 86 | 43 | .667 |
| Auburn | 83 | 48 | .634 |
| South Carolina | 81 | 49 | .623 |
| Missouri | 80 | 50 | .615 |
| Texas A&M | 77 | 52 | .597 |
| Mississippi State | 74 | 54 | .578 |
| Ole Miss | 69 | 57 | .548 |
| Arkansas | 67 | 59 | .523 |
| Tennessee | 62 | 63 | .496 |
| Kentucky | 53 | 72 | .424 |
| Vanderbilt | 53 | 72 | .424 |
(data from the always-helpful stassen.com)
This is the Tennessee recruits know: not Kentucky and Vanderbilt, but not on par with the rest of the league either.
And this is where Jeremy Pruitt’s first comparison must fall: not to Georgia, and certainly not to Alabama. But what are his Vols doing against the rest of the SEC East?
#5: The Vols vs The Non-UGA SEC East
At the old site we did an annual off-season piece ranking the importance of each game for the upcoming season. It was equal parts fun and futility, because it’s impossible to know how good or bad Derek Dooley’s offense will actually be when Missouri comes rolling into Knoxville on November 17. But in general, I think we can say this for 2018: the five most important games will be the ones against the non-Georgia SEC East.
West Virginia will be the first impression and would be fun to steal, but Pruitt’s first real measuring stick will be how this rebuild is going compared to the one in Gainesville, how quickly it can catch what’s happening in both Columbias, and how well it can avoid another loss to Kentucky or Vanderbilt.
A little more than a month ago we looked at Pruitt’s relative recruiting success compared to the non-UGA East in blue-chip ratio. Tennessee’s has fallen, for the moment, below the 50% threshold needed to be in the national championship hunt. But the Vols are still out-performing the rest of the non-UGA division. Six of Tennessee’s 14 commitments for 2019 are four-or-five-stars, 42.3%. South Carolina sits at 6-of-16 (37.5%), Florida at 4-of-11 (36.3%), while Kentucky, Missouri, and Vanderbilt are yet to nab a four-or-five-star.
That’s good news for climbing the ladder in the future. In the present?
Here’s how the non-UGA SEC East projects in ESPN’s FPI, Bill Connelly’s S&P+, and Phil Steele’s Power Poll:
| Team | FPI | S&P+ | Steele |
| Florida | 21 | 32 | 23 |
| Missouri | 29 | 30 | 28 |
| South Carolina | 28 | 35 | 24 |
| Tennessee | 54 | 79 | 70 |
| Kentucky | 60 | 64 | 75 |
| Vanderbilt | 76 | 75 | 85 |
As you can see, the preseason expectation for Tennessee is basically what the last ten years have been: better than Kentucky and Vanderbilt, but in a lower tier than Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida’s restart.
We’ve got this as only the fifth most important question for Pruitt’s first year. But it will rise quickly as time goes on. Derek Dooley had the Vols competitive for four quarters with the entire division in 2012 until he was a dead man walking, but couldn’t take advantage. Butch Jones should have won the SEC East in 2015 and 2016, but too many close games led to too many close losses before the bottom fell out. Now Georgia is the biggest threat within the division since Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow a decade ago.
The early returns in recruiting suggest Pruitt will bring in the necessary talent to get the Vols back in the conversation. How much progress will we see on the field in those five games this fall?
10 Questions for 2018
10. Which backups on the defensive line will be starters in 2019?
09. Can special teams make the difference in a coach’s first year?
08. What do we know about Tyson Helton’s offense from his time at USC?
07. Who’s the third/fourth wide receiver in an offense that will actually throw them the ball?
06. What about team chemistry with a first-time coach and a hodgepodge of players?