Tennessee football: Ranking every 2020 game by difficulty

10. Nov. 7 – at Arkansas Razorbacks

On paper, the Hogs may not be Tennessee football’s toughest opponent. Sure, they’ve been far and away the worst team in the SEC the past two years, and Sam Pittman has a mess to clean up. However, Pittman is cut from good cloth when it comes to the coaching ranks, and he’ll turn Arkansas into a very tough team, particularly once it gets closer to November.

You could also say that playing this game in Fayetteville gives Arkansas an advantage. But with the seating capacity rules likely to remain in place, as we mentioned in our opening slide, home field advantage is not as much of a factor. Unless something drastically changes, that’s the least important factor this year of all the factors when it usually is the second most important factor.

What, then, makes this game so easy? Well, the Vols will be coming off of a bye week. They will have played the Alabama Crimson Tide on Oct. 24 before not playing any game on Halloween. The week after Arkansas, they’ll be hosting the Texas A&M Aggies, so it could be a trap game, but overall, Jeremy Pruitt will have his kids well-rested and ready to go here.

Beyond that, despite the positives we gave Arkansas in our opening paragraph, the team is still a disaster. Feleipe Franks won’t change that much, and the rest of the team undergoing a complete system overhaul puts 0-10 on the table. So yes, playing this team off a bye makes it the easiest game on the slate.