Florida-Alabama SEC Championship Game All too Painfully Familiar for Tennessee Vols Fans
An SEC Championship game featuring the Florida Gators and Alabama Crimson Tide is all too familiar for Tennessee Volunteers fans in a bitter way.
As painful as not winning the SEC East is for Tennessee Vols fans this year, it only stings worse when they think about who they have to watch in the SEC Championship game this year.
It is the most common match-up that the Title game has had in its 25-year history: Florida vs Alabama. Tennessee’s two most hated rivals get to play for conference supremacy.
This isn’t how it was supposed to be.
Related Story: A Look at the Rare Times the Tennessee-Florida Loser Has Won the East
In 1992, when the Southeastern Conference split into two divisions and created an SEC Championship game, consensus was that the Vols and Tide would be the most common representatives of the East and West respectively.
After all, they were the two historically winningest programs in the conference, and that game often played a huge role in determining the SEC Champion anyway.
But as the title game enters its 25th year, that has still never happened.
For Tennessee, a much more nightmarish scenario has happened. While their hated rival held up its end of the bargain by representing the SEC West in the title game 11 times, the Vols have failed to hold up their end. They’ve only represented the East five times.
Instead, they found a new bitter rival in the Florida Gators…and they watched that team become the dominant representative of the East in the title game. Florida has won the East 13 times since the divisional split, playing in more than half of the SEC Championship games.
Because of this, naturally, the Vols have had to sit at home and watch their two most hated teams play for the SEC Championship a lot.
They will be doing that again this year, and it will be the ninth time that has happened.
The worst part is that of those nine times, the Vols expected to win the East six of them. The only three forgivable years were 1994, 2008 and 2009.
But in a major twist of irony, 2008 and 2009 just happened to be the years where the SEC Championship game between Florida and Alabama would decide the eventual national champion.
Seriously, how much does this have to hurt for Vols fans?
Looking at the other years, it happened five times in the 1990s, including four of the first five SEC Championship games.
In 1992, just like this year, the Vols started 5-0 with wins over Florida and Georgia but choked away the East with three straight losses, handing it to the Gators.
And in both years, they have had to watch those Gators play an undefeated Alabama team in the title game.
In 1993, 1995, and 1996, Tennessee’s only conference loss was to the Gators. It resulted in a Florida-Alabama SEC Championship in 1993 and 1996.
In 1999, the Vols lost in The Swamp 23-21, allowing Florida to go to the SEC Championship game. The Gators were rocked by the Tide 34-7 in that game, and that made it hurt worse because that Tennessee team had already destroyed Alabama on the road that year.
And everybody in Knoxville knows they would have done it again.
Then came 2015, the oh so painful one. Tennessee would have gone to Atlanta if they could have just gotten off the field on one of five fourth and long plays against the Gators, but they couldn’t. And they couldn’t hold onto a 27-14 lead in the fourth quarter either.
Losing a heartbreaker 28-27 cost them the East that year.
If the Vols could have just split some of those years, this would be easier. Maybe holding onto the East one of the two times in 1992 or this year, holding off the Gators in 2015, and getting the best of them in either 1993, 1996, or 1999 would make this more tolerable.
But they never did. And because of their own mistakes, they have to watch their two bitter rivals play for bragging rights in the SEC Championship game that they haven’t had since 1998.