The Tennessee football Volunteers continue falling in the Southeastern Conference.
These SEC Power Rankings are getting harder to predict by the week. Tennessee football suffering a bad loss to the best team in the league isn’t what makes it tricky. Everybody who covers the sport saw that one coming.
However that Vols’ blowout loss to the Kentucky Wildcats was so inconsistent with everything that happened before then that it’s still having an impact, as a game involving Kentucky this past week made it even more confusing. The other inconsistent teams remain the South Carolina Gamecocks and Auburn Tigers.
If you took those three teams out, these power rankings would be easy to do. However, they change everything. To make matters worse, Tennessee football won’t be able to clear anything up with its bye this week either.
As we get set to bring you our power rankings following the fifth week of the SEC season and the eighth week of the season overall, record and recency now become the two most important factors. Schedule strength and margin of victory follow.
Given what’s happened, head to head now just has to be a tiebreaker. There are just too many things that have happened over the past couple of weeks for us to treat the situation any differently. At this point, though, it’s clear only four teams appear to be title contention.
Just like last week, there is still one undefeated team in the league and one winless team in the league. Only five teams are above .500 right now, and six teams are now below .500. With the season about to reach the halfway point, the parity seems more clear than ever.
What does all of this mean? How does it affect Tennessee football’s standing? Let’s go ahead and break down everything about the league here. These are our SEC Power Rankings following Week 8 of the 2020 season.