Tennessee football: Vols worst loss to every current and former SEC opponent

Tennessee football has lot to every current and former member of the Southeastern Conference. These are the Volunteers’ worst losses to each school.

A well-documented fact among fans on Rocky Top is that Tennessee football is about five wins away from having a much better history than it already has. Just a few wins would have dramatically altered the course of the Vols over the years.

However, these ended up being losses, and many of them shaped what UT would become. Some losses may have been blessings in disguise given the fact that they needed to alter history. Others, meanwhile, have gotten worse as time went on.

It took all the way until 2016 for Tennessee football to have at least one loss against every current and former SEC opponent. What’s not surprising is that something like that would occur in this decade given how bad things have gone.

Now that they have lost to every school, though, what is their worst loss to every member of the SEC? Well, in this post, we’re going to take another step back in history and look at just that. We’ll include the 13 other current members along with the three former members of the conference.

Our criteria for how bad a loss is can go separate ways. It includes the level of heartbreak or embarrassment that comes with the loss, meaning how bad of a blowout or how close of a loss it was along with how bad the team was. We also analyze the impact it had on the Vols’ season and what it meant if it was a rivalry game.

Lots of these things come into account when you look at these losses, and UT’s SEC losses have had dramatic effects. We’ll rank the losses against each other as well in terms of which ones were simply worse in a vacuum. But the losses don’t all have to come from when both teams were in the SEC, as you’ll see.

So how do the Vols’ conference losses stack up? Which ones are the most painful for them to deal with? Let’s break that down now. This is Tennessee football’s worst loss against ever SEC school and a ranking of how those losses stack up against each other.