Tennessee football: Vols win over Auburn ended 15 losing streaks

14. Games against ranked teams (6 games)

Last win: 2016; Tennessee beats No. 24 Nebraska 38-24

Amidst Tennessee football’s horrendous losing streak that is skewed because of what happened in 2017, the Vols lost six games in a row to ranked teams. Four of them were in 2017 against the Florida Gators on the road, the Georgia Bulldogs at home, the Alabama Crimson Tide on the road and the LSU Tigers at home.

But this year, they lost two more to the West Virginia Mountaineers at a neutral site and Georgia again on the road. Meanwhile, Florida is in the Top 25 again, but they weren’t in the Top 25 when they went up against the Vols.

The last ranked team that UT beat was the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the Music City Bowl to end the 2016 season. It was a memorable win, as it was Joshua Dobbs’s final game with the Vols, the team he carried amidst Butch Jones’s incompetence.

In that game, Derek Barnett broke the all-time career sacks record for the Vols. On top of that, it was their first win against Nebraska, a historic program that stomped them twice in the 1990s. So there was some historical significance to that.

Anyway, the win at Auburn ended Tennessee’s losing streak at six games, so it’s another huge boost for Jeremy Pruitt and co. And in another lesser streak that dates back to this time, you can say it ended their losing streak against ranked teams away from home, which was four games. They also had a five-game losing streak, if we’re being honest, against higher-ranked teams. And that ended here.