Tennessee football: More 2022 bowl projections show just how hard Vols are to project

We have already discussed why it’s so hard this year to project the type of season Tennessee football will have in 2022, and you can read about that here. Bowl projections that have been coming in for the year have demonstrated just how wide the range of possibilities are for UT.

A week after 247Sports projected the Vols to land in the Outback Bowl, which we wrote about here, two more bowl projections came in. College Football News’ projections have Rocky Top going to the Liberty Bowl, but Athlon Sports’ projections have them going to the Citrus Bowl.

Simply put, nobody knows what will happen with Tennessee football. In the Liberty Bowl projection, UT would face the West Virginia Mountaineers in Memphis, Tenn., which was supposed to be the Liberty Bowl matchup at the end of 2020 before COVID cut short the Vols’ season.

On the other hand, the Vols would face the Wisconsin Badgers in Orlando, Fla., for Athlon’s Citrus Bowl projection. Just like the Outback Bowl, the Citrus Bowl is a familiar location for the Vols, as they went their to close out the 1993, 1995, 1996 and 2001 seasons.

Of course, the story here is just how crazy the expectations are for the Vols and how much they range. There’s a huge difference between the Liberty Bowl, to which UT was offered an invitation after that 3-7 season in 2020, and the Citrus Bowl, the best non-New Years Six bowl for the SEC.

This is what we’ve been seeing with projections surrounding Tennessee football for a while now. Lots of it has to do with the disagreements about how good other teams the Vols are playing are, not just how good or bad they might be in Josh Heupel’s second season.

The LSU Tigers and Florida Gators have new head coaches, the Pittsburgh Panthers lost their quarterback and go-to receiver from last year’s ACC Championship team, the South Carolina Gamecocks added Spencer Rattler, and the Kentucky Wildcats are still solid. All five of those teams have a wide range of where they could be.

Given the fact that the Vols play them all, the disparities come in. CFN is actually high on almost all of them, which is why they have UT going 8-4 but still somehow beating the Georgia Bulldogs on the road. The ESPN FPI, meanwhile, projects almost right at 7-5 for UT. Simply put, there’s a range, and it’s wide.

Rocky Top last played in the Liberty Bowl in 1986, when they beat the Minnesota Golden Gophers to close out the season with a 7-5 record. Yes, even then, the bowl game was one to accept teams that had mediocre seasons.

Contrast that with the Citrus Bowl, which was the most common bowl for the Vols during their heyday. All four of those appearances to the bowl game mentioned were among the seven best seasons Phillip Fulmer had at UT, and three of Fulmer’s top 10 finishes involved UT going to that bowl game at the end.

Peyton Manning became famous for playing in the Citrus Bowl. Simply put, it’s an elite bowl game if you’re not going to make a New Years Six game. Taking all of this into account, the Outback Bowl is probably the right compromise for Tennessee football, but nobody really knows yet where they will end up.