Two years ago this week, the Vols headed to Gainesville after losing to Georgia State and BYU. In the middle of that week, it looked like the line in Vegas might become the second-worst of the then 30 years Tennessee and Florida had met consecutively. It settled at +12.5 by kickoff; the Vols lost by 31.
We are trending, shall we say, in the wrong direction:
In now 32 years of playing this rivalry annually, the Vols have been favored seven times, and we’ve won seven times. Vegas doesn’t miss much. When they do, it can be comical: you’ll note the 30-point spread in the, “Urban Meyer might actually attempt murder on Lane Kiffin,” game. Or what was the second-highest line the Vols faced in this rivalry, until last year: 2001, when the Vols went to The Swamp and won anyway.
That +16.5 at kickoff remains the biggest upset in the last 35+ years for Tennessee, a stat we pulled when Jeremy Pruitt’s year one team did the deed at Auburn:
2001 Florida has always been a stupid line all around: we don’t think of that win as the program’s biggest upset, because the Vols were good enough to be in the national championship conversation themselves. The rest of that list looks more like it, with Pruitt’s inclusion proof that it is always possible…and it may not necessarily mean everything.
What we do know is the Vols broke that +16.5 number last year at +18.5, and are headed that way as I write this on Wednesday afternoon this season, currently +19.5. If it stays there, the Vols will face their toughest odds against Florida at any point other than a throwaway line from 2009, and victory would require the program’s biggest upset in Vegas of the last 35 years.
We’re spending less energy worried about Bama these days, which is good. But Florida – vanquished five years ago, should’ve been vanquished four years in a row then, and just 3.5 points away three short (long?) years ago – remains a relevant conversation. “Always within reach, seldom grasped,” is how this usually goes.
But now, even the reach is getting longer. And so perhaps it’s a good moment to frame a couple of conversations.
For Tennessee’s present, six wins will not be lost on Saturday night. On that front, the Gators represent only opportunity. Lose to Florida by 1 or 10 or 30 again, and Tennessee can still find their way to bowl eligibility. In this way, this Tennessee season feels a bit like what I assume it used to be in the Bluegrass: if you can get Florida, Georgia, or Tennessee (Alabama for us), fantastic. But you can still get to six wins without any of them.
Tennessee’s season, so far, has gone about the way you’d think: 32 points on Bowling Green, 56 on Tennessee Tech, and losing to Pitt when -3 in turnovers with a baker’s dozen penalties. In SP+, the Vols are actually up from their preseason projections, with a Top 25 defense and Top 10 special teams.
But it’s in this – the way we think – that opportunity remains stubbornly available to idiots and optimists alike.
The two highest lines the Vols have faced against Florida both took place in December. Where we know this game is here, in September, the SEC opener. It is, most often, the first thing you can talk yourself into. And, most recently, it’s felt like the last thing you could talk yourself into.
If the Vols are not who we think – in a good way – Saturday night is the best opportunity for it to present itself. To be surprised. To be delighted.
I don’t know how to not come to this game with hope, foolish or not. The only way not to, as we learned last year, is to move it to December. And I don’t know how long it will take to move that Vegas line back towards something more reasonable in this series. Or, with Texas and Oklahoma coming, I suddenly don’t know how much longer we’ll be doing this with them every year any way. And unlike the Alabama series, we haven’t been beaten badly enough, recently enough, to make me something other than sad about that for now.
The past has clearly trended in the wrong direction for Tennessee in this rivalry. The present can’t be overly harmed by Saturday night. It’s only the future – the tantalizing, probably improbable fast-forward button on all this business – that’s really up for grabs. And maybe that’s always how it was when Kentucky played these guys under Rich Brooks: we can move the program forward without this one, but hey, we’ll shoot our shot and see if we can’t move it forward faster anyway.
It’s opportunity, somewhere between nowhere and now here. It may not last long Saturday night, and we may get right back to the business of finding six wins.
But it’s still the Wednesday of Florida week. For three decades now, and who knows how much longer, it’s the week to get your hopes up, because those hopes have paid off juuuuuuuuuuuuust enough to do it one more time.
And it’s only Wednesday.
Go Vols.
