All for Tennessee
Fansided

Preseason SEC Power Rankings for 2019: Should Vols start in bottom tier?

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 08: Head coach Jeremy Pruitt of the Tennessee Volunteers brings his team onto the field prior to a game against the East Tennessee State University Buccaneers at Neyland Stadium on September 8, 2018 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Tennesee won the game 59-3. (Photo by Donald Page/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 08: Head coach Jeremy Pruitt of the Tennessee Volunteers brings his team onto the field prior to a game against the East Tennessee State University Buccaneers at Neyland Stadium on September 8, 2018 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Tennesee won the game 59-3. (Photo by Donald Page/Getty Images) /
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
1 of 15
Next
Fan Day
Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images /

Tennessee football had a better offseason than most Southeastern Conference teams. How does that affect the Volunteers in our preseason SEC Power Rankings?

With the first Southeastern Conference team set to play this Saturday, college football is basically here for league. So it’s time for us to go ahead and release our SEC Power Rankings ahead of the season to see where teams stand.

Given the offseason Tennessee football had, including recruiting and returning starters, there’s more excitement surrounding Rocky Top than there was last year. But how does that affect the Vols’ standing entering Jeremy Pruitt’s second season?

Well, that’s exactly what these SEC Power Rankings are going to do. We are going to take what the teams all did the last time out that we saw them, how their recruiting went and how their offseason went as a whole, including transfers they added and starters they had return, to analyze where they stand in the preseason.

To be clear, this is not a projection of where we think they’re going to end up. In fact, it’s not a ranking of how talented we think these teams are. And this will have no bearing on how we predict the games for the first full week.

Power rankings are about the momentum teams have at that moment, and offseason success has to be a factor combined with the last time they played when you do them to open a season. It’s just a way to gauge how things are looking for the programs to start the year.

But after the first full week of games, which begins this weekend and continues into next weekend, we’ll do our rankings solely based on how the teams looked. The first week of a season immediately eliminates the offseason and previous season’s factors when doing power rankings.

For now, though, it’s all we’ve got. So let’s go ahead and break down how the teams in the nation’s best conference are looking stacked against each other heading into 2019. These are our preseason SEC Power Rankings.

Home/Vols Football