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Are High Expectations a Bad Omen for Tennessee Volunteers?

By Caleb Calhoun

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The history of high expectations for the Tennessee Volunteers is not a good one. Will that change this year, or will it be more of the same?

They say every season and every game stands on its own. But that is not true.

No matter how you slice it, history blatantly shows that previous games and seasons can, at the very least, have a psychological effect on a team. The same will be true for the Tennessee Volunteers as they enter their third season under head coach Butch Jones.

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Short of winning big on the field, Jones has done just about everything needed to set the Vols up for a great season this year. He has stocked the cupboard, recruited well, shown flashes of greatness, and brought interest and life back into the Tennessee football program.

And now, after seven straight seasons with unranked finishes and no more than seven wins, including five seasons with a losing record, the Vols have hype and expectations around them once again.

But let’s ignore the fact that these players have no experience winning and still have things like the losing streak to Florida in the back of their minds. Let’s just pay attention to Tennessee’s history with expectations.

Every fan base complains that their team always falls terribly short of expectations. Tennessee proves it better than anybody.

The last time the Vols had expectations was 2012. That was Derek Dooley’s third year, just like this was Butch Jones’s third year. It was supposed to be the year everything came together, and after a 2-0 start the Vols were in the Top 25 for the first time since the first week of 2008. Then came a loss to Florida, and that was the beginning of the end for Dooley’s career as the team fell to 5-7.

Before that season, we have to go all the way back to 2005 to look at when the Tennessee fan base had a pre-season to be excited about. Remember, this was still during the heyday for the Vols under Phil Fulmer. They had just come off a 10-3 season and SEC East championship while going through three quarterbacks, and, just like this year, they returned nearly their entire team.

That year, they started off No. 3. But they finished 5-6, their first losing season in 17 years at the time, with a loss to Vanderbilt, their first in 23 years at the time.

But that’s not all.

Rewind back to 2002. Tennessee was even more in its heyday at this point, just a few years removed from a national championship and coming off an 11-2 season and top-five finish. Fulmer’s Vols put together a top-five recruiting class and started the year as the favorites to win the SEC Championship with a preseason top-five ranking.

And they fell to 8-5 on the year, the most losses they had in a season since 1988 at the time.

The falling short of expectations had gotten progressively worse for Tennessee, and it obviously culminated with probably the worst seven-year stretch in the program’s history from 2008-2014, hitting rock bottom in 2012 with the Dooley disaster.

Tennessee is slowly coming out of the ashes and set to begin a new chapter in its football history. But one thing it needs to be able to do this time is handle expectations.

Otherwise, this year could be another disaster. And Jones will be out the door.

Next: What if Steve Spurrier Never Left the Florida Gators?

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