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Tennessee football: 10 seasons Vols could claim national championships

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 5: The Tennessee Volunteers mascot Smokey runs through the end zone after a score against the Georgia Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 5, 2013 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 5: The Tennessee Volunteers mascot Smokey runs through the end zone after a score against the Georgia Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 5, 2013 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images /

Tennessee football has six national championships, but they could have more. Here are 10 years in which the Volunteers could claim titles.

The UCF Knights just claimed a national championship from 2017. The Auburn Tigers and Kentucky Wildcats have each retroactively claimed a title in recent years. At this point, it’s about time Tennessee football does the same thing.

We know about how the Alabama Crimson Tide and Notre Dame Fighting Irish go back and randomly claim national titles all the time. With other schools now doing it, it’s only fair that the Vols join in on the fun.

Currently, Tennessee football claims six official national championships: 1938, 1940, 1950, 1951, 1967 and 1998. To be fair to the other schools, the Vols don’t have much business claiming the title in 1967 since they had two losses.

However, given that fact, there are numerous other years they could go back and claim titles. In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of those seasons and rank them by the strongest case they have.

We’re also going to take into account when bowl games actually mattered. If both the AP and Coaches Polls were declaring national titles before the bowl games, then we will consider them irrelevant. However, the bowl games will matter in years that they were played before either of the final polls was released.

If you follow the Vols’ history, there’s not much controversy in this regard. That’s especially true with the teams we’re going to rank here.

Now let’s be clear about another thing. We are not saying these Vols teams should be consensus national champions. We’re just saying the Vols should even the playing field and start using the same method numerous other elite schools are using to declare themselves national champions.

They did that a bit with 1967. Let’s do that with other seasons throughout the school’s rich and storied history. These are 10 Tennessee football seasons that the Vols could retroactively claim national championships.

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