It looks like the Tennessee football Volunteers could play in a prestigious bowl.
With only 76 teams set to play this fall, there won’t be enough bowl slots to fill. Two Power Five conferences not playing will vault the bowl status for lots of other teams. Tennessee football is no different on that front.
Bowl projections by Jerry Palm of CBS Sports showed Rocky Top going to the Citrus Bowl. Palm has the Vols slated to play the UCF Knights in Orlando, Fla. on Jan. 1. In his method for this adjusted season, Palm eliminated bowl games contractually obligated to having both teams from conferences that have postponed play.
The Alabama Crimson Tide, Georgia Bulldogs, Florida Gators, Auburn Tigers and Texas A&M Aggies are all projected to go to New Year’s Six bowl games. That means Palm has Tennessee football being the sixth best SEC team this year, as the Citrus is the highest for the league outside of those.
Just behind UT in the Outback Bowl, Palm has the LSU Tigers facing the Appalachian State Mountaineers. Obviously, Appalachian State would not go to such a bowl game in any normal season that didn’t see the Big Ten, Pac-12, MAC, Mountain West and four independents all postponing their sports.
Palm’s College Football Playoff had Georgia facing the top-seeded Clemson Tigers in the Sugar Bowl and Alabama facing the Oklahoma Sooners in the Rose Bowl. It had the North Carolina Tar Heels facing Florida in the Orange Bowl, the Cincinnati Bearcats facing Texas A&M in the Fiesta Bowl and the Memphis Tigers facing Auburn in the Peach Bowl.
Outside of SEC teams, the only other New Year’s Six game featured the Texas Longhorns and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the Cotton Bowl. That makes for five SEC teams, three ACC teams including Notre Dame, two Big 12 teams and two AAC teams.
Looking at all of this, if the season had gone as planned, there would likely be two fewer SEC teams in the New Year’s Six in these projections. That would put Tennessee football in probably either the Gator Bowl or the Music City Bowl. But if they did go to Orlando, it’d be the first time they played in the Citrus Bowl since their last top five finish back in 2001.