Tennessee football: Vols return to tradition with Troy on 2020 schedule

Tennessee football added the Troy Trojans to its 2020 schedule. A solid Group of Five program on the schedule is a return to tradition for the Volunteers.

In 2018 and heading into 2019, Tennessee football has deviated from a formula it should always have when scheduling non-conference opponents. That tradition involves one traditional power, one FCS school, and two solid Group of Five schools, at least one of whom is very good at its own level.

However, the 2018 schedule did not have one good Group of Five team. The UTEP Miners and Charlotte 49ers were both coming off historically bad seasons, even if the West Virginia Mountaineers were a good Power Five matchup.

To be fair, though, you can never really predict if a Group of Five opponent will be valuable two to three years down the line. It was just an extra level of bad in 2018. What Tennessee football is doing in 2019 is even worse, though.

The Vols don’t have a Power Five opponent. All they have is the BYU Cougars, a program that has been trying to reach a Power Five conference and is Independent, to be fair. But let’s be honest, they aren’t at the same elite status as an Independent that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish are, even if they do want to claim that sham 1984 national title.

Simply put, the Vols have not had their standard formula the past two schedules. But 2020 is finally a return to what they should always be doing, and the addition of the Troy Trojans to the schedule finalized that.

Tennessee football’s four non-conference opponents are Troy, the Charlotte 49ers, the Furman Paladins and the Oklahoma Sooners. So they have their traditional power foe in Oklahoma, and they even face OU on the road. They also have their traditional easy opponent in Furman for a tune-up win. Charlotte and Troy are the perfect two Group of Five opponents.

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Troy been a very good program over the past three years, winning 10 games under Neal Brown all three seasons and even securing a Sun Belt Championship. With Brown leaving for West Virginia, they now have Chip Lindsay as head coach, an elite offensive mind who was offensive coordinator of the Auburn Tigers. He is almost certain to keep the program going.

Meanwhile, Charlotte has the potential to be a solid program with the addition of new head coach Will Healy, who came from the Austin Peay Governors. However, they really made a mistake firing Brad Lambert, meaning they doing the opposite of what Troy did. As a result, we can project out what UT’s overall schedule will look like in 2020.

Oklahoma will once again be a College Football Playoff contending opponent. Troy will be an elite Group of Five opponent. Charlotte will be the struggling Group of Five program to beat up on. And Furman will be the FCS program that’s a fall out of bed victory.

All boxes are checked, and this is the perfect type of non-conference schedule Tennessee football needs to complement an SEC season. They always need to have one good Group of Five school and an elite Power Five school. The past couple of years, deviating from that was a bad idea. Returning to it is a return to tradition for the program under Jeremy Pruitt.