Tennessee football’s huge wins last two times coming off bye at 2-3

The Tennessee football Volunteers are in a familiar situation.

When Tennessee football takes the field against the Arkansas Razorbacks on Saturday, it will be doing something it has only done twice before this century. However, it’ll also be the second time in three years such a thing happened.

Rocky Top will be playing a game coming off a bye week with a 2-3 record. If the previous two times they did that are any indication, though, the Saturday’s matchup in Fayetteville, Ark. will be good news for them.

Back in 2018, Jermey Pruitt’s first year on the job, Tennessee football had suffered three losses, all by 26 points, to the West Virginia Mountaineers, Florida Gators and Georgia Bulldogs. They entered their bye week at 2-3 and on a two-game losing streak.

Coming off the bye, they faced the No. 21 ranked Auburn Tigers and pulled off a huge 30-24 upset on the road. It was the Vols’ first win over an SEC West team in 10 years and their first win over Auburn since 1999. We wrote at the time that the win actually ended 15 majors streaks.

Although UT stumbled to a 5-7 record that year, its win over Auburn stood out and, at the time, hinted that Pruitt was truly building something. Of course, that meant that fans didn’t expect to be 2-3 again coming off a bye in his third year.

Before Pruitt, though, Tennessee football kicked off this century in a similar situation with Phillip Fulmer at the helm. The Vols came into the 2000 season with expectations to rebuild. After six straight top 10 finishes, they began the preseason outside of the top 10, and experts were right, as they stumbled to a 2-3 record.

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That record included a heartbreaking last-minute drive given up to the Florida Gators, an upset loss to the LSU Tigers, led by an unknown first-year head coach named Nick Saban, and their first loss to the Georgia Bulldogs since 1988. As a result, they fell out of the top 25 and were under .500 for the first time since 1994 at the time.

However, the Vols made a quarterback switch during the bye. After starting sophomore Joey Mathews in the opener and redshirt freshman A.J. Suggs the next four games, they moved to true freshman Casey Clausen, who had the most hype of the three entering the season anyway.

Clausen’s first start would be against the Alabama Crimson Tide. Now, to be fair, this was not Saban’s Crimson Tide. Heck, it wasn’t even Gene Stallings’ Crimson Tide. Despite winning the SEC title in 1999, Alabama was in the midst of what would become a 3-8 season.

At the time, though, Alabama was on a two-game winning streak and had gotten back to first place in the SEC West, so they had every reason to be confident about this matchup in Knoxville. The Vols, meanwhile, were trying to become the first team to beat Alabama six straight times since the Sewanee Tigers did in 1896, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1910 and 1911.

Fulmer’s kids pulled out the win in ugly fashion, 20-10. That sparked a six-game winning streak to close out the season, turning a 2-3 record into an 8-3 regular season finish and setting the stage for the future with Clausen at the helm.

On Saturday, Tennessee football will step onto the field once again with a 2-3 record coming off a bye. Unlike 2000 and 2018, they weren’t rebuilding or under a first-year head coach. They’ll still have a chance to spark a turnaround, though, and once again, it will be against an SEC West foe.