Tennessee football: Five encouraging signs for Vols bowl game quest

Despite being 2-5, Tennessee football has a real shot at a bowl. Here are five positive signs for the Volunteers’ postseason chances.

They are 2-5, 1-3 in the SEC, have two home losses to Group of Five programs and are coming off a 35-13 loss to the Alabama Crimson Tide. But Tennessee football still has an outside shot at a bowl game with the way the rest of their schedule is laid out, and the improvements shown over the last few weeks should give Vols fans some encouragement.

Saturday’s loss to Alabama even showed more areas of improvement. As a result, fans all over Rocky Top enter the final portion of Jeremy Pruitt’s second season with a bit of cautious optimism. Could they indeed engineer a dramatic turnaround?

There are plenty of reasons for this to be possible. They include the people and positions who are getting better, but they also include a few other factors, including advantages Tennessee football has had all season long.

In this post, we’re going to look at the biggest reasons Vol fans should be encouraged about their team’s prospects of reaching a bowl game throughout the final five games of the season. Yes, they have to go 4-1 in those five games, and that could be extremely difficult for a team that had such a rough start. But it’s certainly not impossible.

UT has given outsiders numerous reasons to believe in them over the past few weeks. The quest to reach a bowl will be a major test for Pruitt and his coaching staff, but if it happens, it will be a major accomplishment. And hey, that would be another major step for a program that kept setting a new standard for the annoying phrase “Rock Bottom.”

So where is this positive energy coming from? What is improving the morale for the Vols? Let’s take a look here. These are the five encouraging signs for Tennessee football’s prospects of making a bowl game this year.