The Tennessee Vols football team is an eight and a half point favorite in the Outback Bowl against the Wildcats despite two more losses for the Volunteers.
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The Northwestern Wildcats are 10-2 and ranked in the Top 15 in all major polls. The Tennessee Vols are 8-4 and unranked in the AP and Coaches’ Polls while down at No. 23 in the College Football Playoff rankings.
And while Northwestern played in the dismal Big Ten West, it’s hard to find anything better about the SEC East, the division the Vols played in.
Yet somehow, despite all that, Tennessee is favored to win the Outback Bowl over the Wildcats. And they are not just favored.
The point spread is -8.5 points, according to information on OddsShark.
Butch Jones’s team is a significant favorite in this game, which is a bit of a shocker.
Pat Fitzgerald and the Wildcats have the best win among the two, having beaten the Stanford Cardinal to open the season, and they also defeated the Wisconsin Badgers 13-7.
Their two losses are to the Iowa Hawkeyes and Michigan Wolverines, neither of which is to be ashamed of.
Tennessee’s best win is against the Georgia Bulldogs, meanwhile, and they have not beaten any other Power Five teams with winning records.
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Both teams won their final five games of the year, but perhaps the Vegas oddsmakers are placing emphasis on the fact that the Wildcats barely squeaked by in all of their Big Ten games, while Tennessee had complete control in all of them except for the South Carolina Gamecocks.
It also does not help that Northwestern lost by at least 30 to Michigan and Iowa at the same time, while Tennessee is maybe three plays away from being in contention for the College Football Playoff.
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All of that really means this game should be a toss-up more than anything else though. There might be a chance that a few enthusiastic Vols fans, who come in much greater numbers than Wildcats fans, have skewed the odds by betting on Tennessee to win the game.
Or it could be that Tennessee is genuinely that much better.
We’ll obviously find out on New Year’s Day how accurate they were.