Tennessee’s most important game in 2018?
Sometimes you set out to write a piece that gets debated before you publish.
That happened this week, but alas, this topic deserves discussion regardless.
The most important game on Tennessee’s schedule this season is Florida. Easy.
At SEC Media Days last week, Jeremy Pruitt deftly told reporters that "the one game I’ve got circled on my calendar is West Virginia and only because it’s the next one.”
[INSERT JENNIFER LAWRENCE OKAY GIF]
No doubt, Tennessee’s opener against WVU is critical, especially for its bowl hopes, and there’s some early confidence within the program that the Vols can upset the Mountaineers. But a win over Florida — a conference rival that has won 11 of the last 12 meetings — would be the very signature victory in Year 1 for Pruitt that neither Derek Dooley or Butch Jones notched. Knocking off a top South Carolina team in 2013 was nice, but that’s not beating the hated Gators.
“They’re going to die on that hill,” SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey said on Podcast Ain’t Played Nobody recently describing how Pruitt and his staff are approaching the UF game in September.
“They’re going to treat Sept. 22 like it’s the end of the season. If Jeremy Pruitt can beat Florida in his first season, the equity will stockpile.”
Exactly.
With the current roster, these Vols aren’t sniffing Atlanta this year. Making a bowl game is considered around a coin-flip proposition. The midseason gauntlet — at Georgia, at Auburn, Alabama and at South Carolina — is brutal, with Pruitt even joking last Wednesday, “I told (SEC commissioner Greg Sankey) heck, we might as well add the Eagles, ’85 Bears and maybe Grayson High School, too.”
Pruitt was hired with the expectation that wins over Missouri, Kentucky and Vandy are a given at Tennessee — that may not be the case with this 2018 roster — so the UF game, in Neyland Stadium, represents the best chance for the new staff to truly invigorate the program with some momentum.
“I know Jeremy has that game circled, and he has to. A win would be huge,” SEC analyst Gene Chizik told VolQuest.
The Gators are down right now, too. They must replace a couple of key pieces on defense and they're still unsettled at quarterback. Only that hasn’t mattered for Tennessee in the last decade. The Vols have found more ways to lose to mediocre UF teams than Elmer Fudd has to allow Bugs Bunny to miraculously escape. Jones was fired in large part due to his record vs. Tennessee’s rivals — 5-19 against UF, Alabama, Georgia and Vandy. Among those two defeats are a pair of exasperating one-point losses to the Gators.
“When another team is beating you on a regular basis, it don’t seem like the rivalry is probably thick anymore, " Pruitt said at SEC Media Days.
"One thing we’ve got to do is we’ve got to do our part, and I think we will, when it comes to that."
Pruitt has an early opportunity to flip the script.
Beat the Gators early and Tennessee’s new staff will earn some goodwill before an inevitable month-long slog in October. It could be the difference between practicing in December or not, too. Singular wins are overblown in recruiting circles, but there's no doubt that a victory on September 22 would get the attention of Quavaris Crouch, Darnell Wright and Khris Bogle.
“I think that’s just a critical, critical game for them,” SEC Network analyst Tony Barnhart told VolQuest.
“That’ll be their first SEC game, under Pruitt, at home, Gators are still sort of figuring out who they are, that’s a huge game for Tennessee. I’ve got them winning that game and that’s the reason I think they make a bowl this year.”