ESPN names Tennessee as one of 31 teams that can make the College Football Playoff
· Yahoo Sports
We’re a month away from getting this thing going, and the College Football Playoff chatter is already rolling. Tennessee is viewed as a sleeper team, just hanging on to the top 25 in most way-too-early polls. The Volunteers will have a new freshman quarterback, along with a whole lot of change on the defensive side of the ball.
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Pair that up with games against Texas, Alabama, LSU and Texas A&M and you begin to see why some have doubts. Still though, Josh Heupel has found a way to succeed offensively with just about any quarterback he’s been handed. If Tennessee can just even be average defensively — which would be a large jump from last year’s squad — the Volunteers will have a shot to return to the College Football Playoff.
ESPN’s Heather Dinich placed Tennessee 26th of 31 teams with a chance to make the 12-team field. ESPN’s analytics give the Volunteers a 20 percent chance to make the playoff.
“The computers give the Vols the 19th-best chance to make the CFP, and that is extremely generous for a team that won four league games last year and seems positioned for a middle-of-the-pack finish at best,” Dinich wrote.
The opportunity certainly is there though with a loaded conference schedule, along with several key games at home.
“The schedule strength,” Dinich wrote of what the committee will like about the Volunteers. “Tennessee has the 14th-toughest schedule in the country, according to ESPN Analytics. With that comes a little more grace in the committee meeting room. The Vols won’t necessarily be eliminated because of losses to Texas and Alabama because they can sway the committee members with wins against Texas A&M and LSU. At no point in the second half of the season — when the committee is watching most closely — does Tennessee have back-to-back home games. The Vols will have to win on the road, and that’s a factor the committee also considers.”
There were seven SEC teams ranked ahead of Tennessee — Alabama (17), Oklahoma (12), LSU (10), Texas A&M (9), Ole Miss (8), Georgia (5) and Texas (1). The Vols will play four of those teams. They’ll also face South Carolina, which checked in at No. 30.
We’ll be diving much more into this schedule in the coming weeks as the season nears, but you pretty much know what you have to do here if you’re Tennessee. The Vols will have to take care of business in the games they should win (Furman, at Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State, Auburn, at Arkansas, at South Carolina, Kentucky, at Vanderbilt) and then go 2-2 against Texas, Alabama, Texas A&M and LSU. A few of those should-win games figure to be highly competitive simply based on Heupel’s track record on the road over the past several seasons. Trips to Arkansas, South Carolina and Vanderbilt could all be very tricky.
Bottomline: we won’t know much until the lights come on in Atlanta on September 12. That’s when we’ll really start to learn about Faizon Brandon or George MacIntyre (feels like Brandon at this point). From there, a matchup against Texas will likely tell you all you need to know about this team’s chances to make some noise.