Tennessee in the College Football Playoffs. Photo via Tennessee Athletics.
With time ticking down until the start of the first (official) week of the college football season, several of ESPN’s top writers and personalities listed their early-season College Football Playoff projections on Wednesday. And to a bit of a surprise, multiple writers have Tennessee making the 12-team cut for the second time in three years.
ESPN tasked 12 employees to pen their projected CFP teams and seeds, and three of them picked Tennessee. Writer Eli Lederman has Tennessee as the No. 9 seed (taking on No. 8 Texas Tech in Lubbock), writer Bill Connelly has Tennessee as the No. 10 seed (taking on No. 7 Texas Tech in Lubbock), and personality/UT alum Ryan McGee has Tennessee as the No. 11 seed (taking on No. 6 BYU in Provo).
Maybe the projections aren’t a bit of a surprise, though. Maybe they line up extremely close with ESPN’s Football Power Index statistical projections.
ESPN’s FPI has Tennessee with a 21% chance to make the playoffs. That lines up right next to the 25% of ESPN’s writer panel that picked Tennessee to make the final tournament. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, or perhaps it’s a pretty good forecast of where Tennessee’s chances are at in the early going.
All 12 writers’ projections have Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, Georgia, Texas, and Indiana in the playoffs. Nine of the 12 have BYU. Eight have Texas Tech and Boise State.
Six of the 12 projections have LSU, while four have Alabama and Texas A&M. Three projections have Southern Cal, Virginia, and Tennessee, while two have Ole Miss, Oklahoma, and North Dakota State. The final spot gets a bit tricky, as Memphis, Louisville, SMU, Penn State, Houston, and Navy all land on one ballot each.
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Tennessee doesn’t have the toughest schedule in the conference, but it’ll need to knock off some big names during the season in order to be in the running at the end of the year. And based on these seeding projections, it sounds like it would likely come down to the wire for the Vols’ playoff chances.
Tennessee plays four preseason-ranked teams during the season: vs No. 5 Texas, vs No. 13 Alabama, at No. 8 Texas A&M, and vs No. 11 LSU. There are two big takeaways from that pool of teams.
On one hand, Tennessee has the luxury of playing three of its four biggest games at home this year. It’s certainly an advantage that the Vols cannot squander if they want to be playing meaningful December football. On the other hand, though, two of those ranked teams come in the final three weeks of the season. If Tennessee is in a playoff-worthy position heading into the Nov. 14 matchup at Texas A&M, the Vols probably won’t be able to afford a late-season collapse with back-to-back losses against the Aggies and the LSU Tigers.
What do you think? Is Tennessee landing a spot in your preseason College Football Playoff predictions? Sound off in the comments below.