Tennessee football was predicted to reach the 2016 SEC Championship Game at SEC Media Days. The Volunteers are expected to lose to the Alabama Crimson Tide.
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The last time the Tennessee Vols won the SEC East was 2007. The last time they were actually favored to win the SEC East was 2005.
But, for the first time in around a decade, championship success is once again the expectation back on Rocky Top.
As SEC Media Days drew to a close on Thursday, the picks came out. And Butch Jones’s Volunteers were picked to win the East and face off against Nick Saban’s Tide from the West in the SEC Championship game, where Alabama is predicted to three-peat.
Tennessee was third behind Alabama and LSU in terms of teams predicted to win the SEC Championship.
Of course, despite being the two most successful programs in SEC history, the Vols and Tide have ironically never met in the title game. But at the same time, the media has only correctly predicted what the SEC Championship game would be four times ever since the conference split into two divisions in 1992 (1992, 1993, 2009, 2012).
Predicted behind Tennessee in the East are the Florida Gators to come in at second, the Georgia Bulldogs to come in at third, the Kentucky Wildcats and Vanderbilt Commodores to surprisingly come in at fourth and fifth respectively, and the Missouri Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks to come in at sixth and seventh respectively.
Meanwhile, predicted behind the Tide in the West are the LSU Tigers to come in at second, the Ole Miss Rebels to come in at third, the Texas A&M Aggies to come in at fourth, the Arkansas Razorbacks to come in at fifth, and the Auburn Tigers and Mississippi State Bulldogs to come in at sixth and seventh respectively.
See the full voting results here.
Of course, while the predictions can’t be set in stone, it is worth pointing out that the media usually gets at least one team right in its predictions of who will win each division.
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So if the law of averages holds and Alabama doesn’t keep its dominant SEC streak going, there’s a good chance that team is Tennessee. But they should just focus on winning.