The Tennessee Vols are going to their second straight bowl game. The Volunteers will face the Northwestern Wildcats in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day.
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With a No. 23 ranking in the College Football Playoff, the Tennessee Vols football team has a chance to finish the 2015 season in the Top 25 for the first time since 2007.
Ironically, Butch Jones’s football team has a chance to do it in the same bowl game the Vols played in the last time they finished the season ranked: the Outback Bowl.
The Volunteers will face the Northwestern Wildcats, who finished the year 10-2 and second in the Big Ten West.
Pat Fitzgerald’s squad only lost to the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Michigan Wolverines, both of which were blowouts, but they did win their season opener against the eventual Pac-12 champion Stanford Cardinal.
The best part about this game for the Vols is it is a huge opportunity.
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Northwestern is not only 10-2, but they are ranked in the Top 15 in all major polls. The Wildcats are No. 12 in the College Football Playoff rankings, No. 13 in the AP Poll, and No. 12 in the Coaches Poll.
Meanwhile, Tennessee is No. 23 in the College Football Playoff rankings but unranked in the other two polls, needing to jump four teams in each of them.
However, due to who they are playing and with the other bowl match-ups, it is likely that all the Vols have to do to finish the year in the Top 25 in all major polls is to win their bowl game.
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After starting the year ranked at No. 25 in both polls, winning that game to finish 9-4 and in the Top 25 would mean they at the very least met expectations…and they exceeded them in other cases depending on how the postseason plays out.
To make fans more excited, the last time the Vols played Northwestern was in the Citrus Bowl on New Years Day 1997, following the 1996 season. They won that game behind another junior quarterback named Peyton Manning, who set a bowl game record at the time with 408 passing yards.
They won the SEC Championship the next year.