Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl proclaimed that Auburn is an “everything school” following the Tigers’ win over Kentucky this season.
However, Tennessee proved to be the SEC’s everything school during the 2021-22 school year. The Vols and Lady Vols posted the best conference win percentage in the nine sports that the SEC keeps records and at least 13 universities compete in.
That includes: football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, men’s and women’s tennis and volleyball.
The Vols were the “Everything School” in the SEC this year pic.twitter.com/eVyPbtLcas
— SEC Football Vids (@SECFootballVids) May 22, 2022
At first glance, one may think Tennessee’s success in sports that play an abundance of conference games — such as baseball and men’s and women’s basketball — skew the legitimacy of the rankings. However, the rankings combine the conference win percentages in every sport and divide them by nine for the final percentage. This makes all nine sports equally weighted in the rankings.
The Twitter account that put together the rankings — SEC Football Vids — showed its work in the thread, but made one small mistake. SEC Football Vids’ work says that Tennessee soccer went 7-2 in SEC play this season. In reality, the Vols went 8-2 to make the total win percentage .674 instead of .672.
Not only did Tennessee athletics post the best win percentage in SEC play of any team, they did so by a sizable amount. The gap between the Vols and second-place Florida is bigger than the gap between the Gators and seventh-place Ole Miss.
Tennessee is also the only school to finish .500 or better in every sport this season. Men’s basketball, baseball and soccer all won over 75% with women’s tennis and football being the only sports to win less than 60% of its conference games.
Despite its elite consistency, Tennessee won just one regular-season SEC Championship (baseball). However, Tennessee soccer and men’s basketball both won the SEC Tournament, moving the Vols’ conference championship tally to three in the 2021-22 school year.
