Tennessee’s win over No. 11 Kentucky on Saturday did more than just knock the Wildcats out of a New Years Six Bowl possibility; it also gave the Vols a real shot at making a bowl game this season.
With their 24-7 win over the Wildcats, Tennessee picked up their fifth win of the season, meaning they need just one more win to automatically qualify for a bowl game. And several national media outlets that make bowl projections feel the Vols will do what they need to qualify for a bowl.
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Tennessee isn’t back into every major media outlet’s 2018 college football bowl projections, but they’ve found their way back into a lot of them after Saturday’s win. ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Athlon, SB Nation, The Orlando Sentinel, and Saturday Down South all have the Vols going to a bowl game after the end of the regular season, and all of those offer some unique match-ups for the Vols.
In fact, Jim Tomlin of Saturday Down South is very high on the Vols after their upset victory over Kentucky.
“Tennessee looks less like a team praying to finish 6-6 and sneaking into a bowl game, and more like a team ready to grab a postseason nod by the throat,” Tomlin writes. “That’s the impression the Vols left after beating Kentucky on Saturday. The result shuffled our projections a bit, with Tennessee now projected for the Outback Bowl. If Tennessee beats Missouri and Vanderbilt over the next two weeks, the Vols will own a 4-game winning streak and become more appealing both as a hot team and as a program with a reputation for traveling well and selling tickets. Plus the Outback generally chooses an SEC East team — this is not a hard and fast rule because Auburn and LSU have gone to Tampa on New Year’s Day in recent years. But we’re going with the usual trend.”
The Vols played in the Outback Bowl after the 2015 season in which they went 8-4 and suffered close losses to Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama. Tennessee would crush Northwestern in that bowl game, defeating them by a score of 45-6.
Here is where Tennessee is being projected to play in the postseason by all the outlets mentioned above:
ESPN: Independence Bowl vs. NC State (Dec. 27, Shreveport, Louisiana)
Sports Illustrated: Birmingham Bowl vs. Temple (Dec. 22, Birmingham, Alabama)
Athlon: Liberty Bowl vs. Oklahoma State (Dec. 31, Memphis, Tennessee)
SB Nation: Belk Bowl vs. NC State (Dec. 29, Charlotte, North Carolina)
Orlando Sentinel: Liberty Bowl vs. Oklahoma State (Dec. 31, Memphis, Tennessee)
Saturday Down South: Outback Bowl vs. Northwestern (Jan. 1, Tampa, Florida)
