Tennessee football: Where Vols have gone bowling with five or more losses

There aren’t many times Tennessee football made a bowl game with five or more regular season losses. When they have, here is where the Volunteers went.

For only the fifth time in school history, Tennessee football is heading to a bowl game with five or more regular season losses. It makes sense that the Vols would have very few experiences in postseason play with this many losses.

After all, five-loss regular season teams didn’t start making postseason appearances regularly until the 1980s. That was just as the Vols were about to enter a roughly 20-year period in which they were a regular in the top 25, never flirting with five losses.

Once they fell as a program this decade, they began to miss out on bowl games altogether, evidenced by the fact that they missed a bowl in five seasons this decade. So it’s not often Tennessee football reaches bowl eligibility with five or more losses in a regular season.

But where do they go when they have this many losses? In this post, we’re going to take a look at that. To qualify for the list, UT has to have suffered at least five losses in the regular season. We’ll list the seasons in the order that they occurred and show the bowl game they went to along with the record they had when they received the bowl invite.

What’s interesting is the fact that their invites have gotten more prestigious over the years with five losses, and this could be their most prestigious bowl invite ever. To be fair, this is also the first year they have five regular season losses but a winning record in the SEC.

Still, these other seasons are comparable. and they could provide a bit of a framework for what will happen to the Vols this year. So let’s break down how they ended here. These are the four bowl games Tennessee football has ever received an invitation to with five or more losses during the regular season.