Tennessee football: Ranking games on Vols 2018 schedule by importance

Tennessee football has to focus on specific games for a successful first season under Jeremy Pruitt. Here are the Volunteers’ games ranked by importance.

The 2018 Tennessee football team could go anywhere between 3-9 and 8-4 in Jeremy Pruitt’s first season at the helm. As usual, the Vols have a collection of games that they are circling as sure wins, and as usual over the past few years, they have a few sure losses as well.

So the season comes down to a few crucial toss-up games. That’s always the case, but this year, those toss-up games determine if they make a bowl or not as opposed to determining if they can make the SEC Championship or not.

Unfortunately, that was the case for Tennessee football fans the first five years of this decade, so they know what it’s like to be in this situation now. Still, it’s part of the game, and we’re going to do our part to break down the schedule.

In this post, we’re going to rank the 12 games on the Vols’ schedule based on importance. These rankings are not based on schedule difficulty. And they’re not similar to must-win games. We break the games down based on how much the Vols should focus on them.

As a result, the fall out of bed wins and almost sure losses will all be near the bottom of this list. Those won’t do anything to determine the outlook of this year. The nature of how much of a toss-up a game is, whether or not it’s a conference game, whether or not it’s a divisional game and whether or not it’s a rivalry game will all come into play.

This confluence factors created a random assortment of these games. So let’s go ahead and break down how they stack up against each other. This is our ranking of the 12 games on Tennessee football’s 2018 schedule based on importance.