The chorus of UT’s de facto fight song should be changed from Good Ol’ Rocky Top to Same Ol’ Rocky Top. Everybody loved the announcement from EA Sports on Twitter that a college football game is coming back. The last one released was NCAA Football 14, which came out in July of 2013. What’s eery, though, is just how much Tennessee football hasn’t really changed since then.
Sure, there are obvious differences. Peyton Manning, Jason Witten, Arian Foster and Eric Berry were the biggest NFL stars from UT at the time. Jeremy Pruitt was in his first year ever as a defensive coordinator, with the Florida State Seminoles. Future stars were in high school or unheralded freshmen.
However, those are natural changes that come with any gap. What’s odd is just how similar a situation the Vols are in as a football program right now to where they were when the last EA Sports video game was released before it was discontinued. These are the five ways UT is unchanged as a program.
5. Top 25 drought
At the time of NCAA 14’s release, the Vols were in an unprecedented top 25 drought. They had gone five years without a top 25 finish or even achieving nine wins, something that was unheard of on Vol Nation until then.
In fact, before that drought began, UT had not gone back to back years without a top 25 finish since 1983 and 1984, and they hadn’t gone back to back years without nine wins since 1981 and 1982. The program truly fell off the map.
Well, Tennessee football has fallen off the map again just as EA Sports announced the revival of the game. At the moment, they haven’t had a top 25 finish since 2016, going four straight seasons without one. They had two straight top 25 finishes in 2015 and 2016, and those remain the only such finishes since that 2007 top 25 finish, which was the last one before the initial drought.