Tennessee football: Ranking every Vols team in 2010s decade

1. 2015

9-4 (5-3)

Won Outback Bowl; No. 22 AP; No. 23 Coaches

There was no higher point of the decade for Tennessee football than the end of this season. It signaled the Vols being back. Heading into the year, they had their first preseason top 25 ranking since 2008. This made sense. UT had gone 7-6 the year before, secured its second straight top five recruiting class and returned 20 starters.

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Butch Jones had appeared to finally restore the program, and Joshua Dobbs was the face of it as the returning starting quarterback. Adding junior college weapons like Alvin Kamara would only further help it. And things appeared to start great. UT blew out the Bowling Green Falcons. Then they had a 17-0 lead over the Oklahoma Sooners.

However, the legend of Baker Mayfield was then born. OU came back from that deficit to win in overtime. Two games later, the Vols blew a 27-14 fourth quarter lead at the Florida Gators, allowing them to convert five fourth downs under first-year head coach Jim McElwain, most notably the game-winning touchdown on 4th and 14, to lose 28-27.

All of a sudden, a team with a ton of hype was down to 2-2 with two heartbreaking losses. It got worse the next week, as they blew a third two-touchdown lead, this time falling 24-20 at home to the Arkansas Razorbacks. So now they were 2-3, and with the Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama Crimson Tide up next, 2-5 seemed like a real possibility.

When Georgia jumped out to a 24-3 lead, Jones appeared to be done. But then the turning point of his tenure in Knoxville came. Dobbs connected with Josh Smith for a fourth down touchdown. Then the Vols recovered a fumble on the kickoff and scored again. So they went into halftime down only 24-17.

In the second half, they scored two more touchdowns to go up 31-24. Then the teams traded scores, and the Vols won a huge upset 38-31 thanks to one of Dobbs’s typical five-touchdown 400-total-yard games. That momentum changed everything.

At 3-3, the Vols lost only 19-14 to the eventual national champion Alabama Crimson Tide on the road, and they had a 14-13 lead in the fourth quarter. But despite being 3-4, they cashed in on an easy back-end schedule, winning every game to get to 8-4. That resulted in an Outback Bowl bid against the No. 12 ranked Northwestern Wildcats.

There was no doubt in that game. Tennessee football used a dominant defense to win 45-6. They finished with nine wins for the first time since 2007, and it was their first top 25 finish since that year as well. Also, they met expectations in the end, which was a big deal.

This is ranked higher than the 2016 team because it was one play away from winning every game it lost, and these guys didn’t lose to any bad teams. The morale was much higher after this season as well because UT was returning everybody again. That puts the 2015 Vols on top of this list ranking all Tennessee football teams of the 2010s decade.

For more of our posts recapping the Tennessee Vols during the 2010s decade, please click here. If you want to just look at football stories recapping the Vols from this decade, you can click here.