Tennessee football was placed in the preseason Top 10 of the Amway Coaches Poll for 2016. But as of right now, the Volunteers should not be in any Top 10.
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Going into Butch Jones’s fourth year, Tennessee Vols fans are rightfully excited about the future of the program. After all, they just came off a 9-4 season, barely losing all four games, and they return almost every starter on both sides of the ball.
As a result, the Vols are ranked No. 10 in the 2016 Preseason Coaches Poll, which was released on Thursday, Aug. 4.
That is a huge stretch given Tennessee’s recent history.
So a team that has had one Top 25 finish in the past eight years, peaking at No. 22 in the AP Poll at the end of last year, along with six losses or more in seven of the past eight years, and went 2-3 against Top 25 teams last year, and only beat three teams with a winning record all season, one of whom was the Bowling Green Falcons, gets to start the next year in the Top 10? Even though they haven’t been in the Top 10 in over a decade?
Again, given the amount of returning players, Vols fans have every right to be excited about the start of the season. I even said they are setting their sights too low by only thinking about winning the SEC East in a post you can see here.
But while magazine services and other media outlets may have a right to predict the Vols to be a Top 10 team, one of the official polls in college athletics should actually base this a little bit on what you’ve already done.
And fair or not, Tennessee football has simply not done enough to earn a spot in the Top 10…yet.
They choked in four big games last year. They are 1-8 against Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, their three biggest rivals, in Jones’s three years in Knoxville.
And they rode one of the easier schedules in their school’s history to a 9-4 record last year, with their final five games of the regular season against teams who did not finish with a winning record.
Sure, they blew out an overrated Northwestern Wildcats team in the Outback Bowl. But how many times have we seen bowl game wins overvalued? The last two times the Vols started the preseason in the Top 10, 2002 and 2005, they were coming off of blowout bowl wins. They finished both of those seasons unranked, even missing a bowl game in 2005.
So given the school’s history since the start of the new millennium, no team should be trusted less to reach expectations than Tennessee. And as a result, while they can be a preseason Top 25 team, they should not be in the Top 10.
In fact, the Vols should not come close to the Top 10 until after their fourth game of the season. If they are 4-0 after playing the Florida Gators, finally ending that dreaded streak, then we can talk about the guys in Knoxville.
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Until then, spare me any talk of them doing anything worthwhile.