Tennessee football: Vols, SEC and top 25 predictions for Week 1 of 2019

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: A view of the outside of Neyland Stadium before a game between the Florida Gators and Tennessee Volunteers on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: A view of the outside of Neyland Stadium before a game between the Florida Gators and Tennessee Volunteers on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images) /
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Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images /

Tennessee football’s opener is a week after the first FBS game of the season. Here are our Week One Volunteers, SEC and top 25 predictions for 2019.

College football is back! Okay, so Tennessee football doesn’t begin its season until a week from now. However, the season itself begins tomorrow, and it involves an SEC team. What officially counts as Week One last from tomorrow through Labor Day.

Since all of that is one week, and since an SEC team is part of the first Saturday, our first round of predictions are coming a week early this year. There is one SEC game on Aug. 24 and another on Thursday, Aug. 29. We also have one game between two SEC teams to call and a game featuring a top 25 SEC team against another top 25 team.

There are no non-conference games worth covering this opening week, so our predictions to kick off the season just involves those 13 games involving SEC teams. The standout ones are the all-SEC game, the game with two top 25 teams and obviously Tennessee football’s opener.

As we do every year with our predictions, we’ll go in order of the games that our scheduled but close with the Vols. We will not only predict the game but the score as well en route to determining who you should take in the spread and whether or not you should take the over or under in the game.

Throughout the year, we’ll track how we are straight up, against the spread and on the over/under. And we’re setting the 52 percent goal, which is what you need to make money in Vegas. Sometimes, the lines are obvious. Other times, they are games we would never predict.

However, we have to do all of them. And they are all hard at the start of the season since we have no idea what to make of any of the teams. So this will solely be about what we’re projecting for each team this season.

Still, let’s celebrate. The sport has returned, as have our predictions. We can finally get set to enjoy all the fun that comes with it. So here are our Tennessee football, SEC and top 25 predictions for the first week of the season.