Tennessee football is in the Top 10 for the first time in a decade. The Volunteers were ranked No. 10 in the USA TODAY 2016 Preseason Amway Coaches Poll.
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The hype and expectations behind the Tennessee Vols football program going into Butch Jones’s fourth year as head coach is as real as ever now.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Tennessee has cracked the Top 10 of one of the major polls in college football. The last time was Oct. 29, 2006, when they were ranked No. 8 after getting to 7-1 and beating the South Carolina Gamecocks on the road the day before.
This time, the Vols are No. 10 in the USA TODAY Preseason Amway Coaches Poll, which was released Thursday at noon.
They are the third highest ranked SEC team, behind the Alabama Crimson Tide at No. 1 and the LSU Tigers at No. 6.
Other SEC teams behind the Vols in the rankings are the Ole Miss Rebels at No. 12, the Georgia Bulldogs at No. 16, and the Florida Gators at No. 25.
Florida, Georgia, and Alabama are the only preseason Top 25 teams on Tennessee’s schedule this year, but the Texas A&M Aggies did receive 34 votes, and they host Tennessee in October.
The Appalachian State Mountaineers, whom the Vols will host on opening night, also received a vote in the polls.
Other SEC teams who received votes include the Arkansas Razorback, the Auburn Tigers, and the Mississippi State Bulldogs.
The other teams in the Top 10 ahead of the Vols in addition to Alabama and LSU were the Clemson Tigers at No. 2, the Oklahoma Sooners at No. 3, the Florida State Seminoles at No. 2, the Ohio State Buckeyes at No. 5, the Stanford Cardinal at No. 7, the Michigan Wolverines at No. 8, and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish at No. 9.
This is also the first time since 2005 that Tennessee is in the Top 10 in a preseason poll. The Vols opened that year ranked No. 3 in the country, only to become one of the most disappointing teams in college football history by finishing the year at 5-6.
Last year, they had their first Top 25 finish in both polls since 2007, and with so many starters back, the hype has only grown.
When Tennessee was last in the Top 10 overall, they gave up a long drive to the LSU Tigers and Jamarcus Russell to lose at the end of the game the following week. Nobody at the time could have predicted that it would knock them out of the Top 10 for the next 10 years.
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So Vols fans are excited to be back in the middle of the hype. Now, the fun really begins.