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Tennessee football: Five biggest reasons for Vols turnaround this season

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 12: Tennessee Volunteer players celebrate with Tyler Byrd #10 after his touchdown during the second half of a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 12, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 12: Tennessee Volunteer players celebrate with Tyler Byrd #10 after his touchdown during the second half of a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 12, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images
Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images /

5. The schedule got more consistently easier.

This doesn’t apply to their 0-2 start. After all, as we mentioned, they faced two Group of Five teams at home. But the schedule is a reason Tennessee football fell so far behind the eight-ball after that start and had to get red hot to claw back to .500.

That’s because after their first win, a brutal road was ahead. They would face the Florida Gators, Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama Crimson Tide in three of four games. All three of these teams are College Football Playoff caliber teams, and two of them were on the road. As a result, we knew a 1-4 start was coming, and 2-5 would be best-case scenario before the final weekend in October.

This was always why UT needed to win those first two games. And it’s why those two losses were so disastrous. A mid-October stretch that always plagues them was doing it again, and it further contributed to Jeremy Pruitt’s team being left for dead. But a funny thing happened in the middle of that stretch. The Vols shocked the Mississippi State Bulldogs after losing to Georgia.

MSU was easier than Florida and Georgia. Then, after Alabama, UT got a slate of games easier than even MSU in the South Carolina Gamecocks, UAB Blazers and Kentucky Wildcats. Of those, only UAB currently has a winning record, and they haven’t beaten anybody with a winning record.

So the schedule for Rocky Top got much easier outside of that horrendous start, and it paid off. That doesn’t explain why the Vols are better than their start, though. We go to other slides to analyze that improvement.

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