History has shown a win over Florida is significant for UT's season

[Other_Guy]

Tennessee has beaten Florida 3 times in 20 years. Heupel has 2 of those wins - in only 4 tries.
That is significant as well.

 

[McDad]

Ya but in the 90s it was pretty much UT and UF and then everyone else. Whoever won that game was almost certain to go to the SEC championship. Not almost certain, certain. From its inception in 92 through 2001 the only teams that went from the East were UT or UF.

Yes. That's why my 2nd sentence was typed the way it was.

Let's not talk about the fact that even in those circumstances we still managed to lose to them over and over

I didn't talk about it. But since you brought it up, they were the favored team for most of those games.

 

[Swiftybaby]

Just remember this was probably going to be a loss if UF’s starting QB doesn’t go down. Lagway is a talented freshman that for the most part played like a freshman in a hostile road environment.

And if aunt Jane had a pecker she’d be uncle John

 

[VFL-82-JP]

I think Franklin nailed it (post 25). The last 34 years aren't a good window to analyze, because it's really three windows

On a graph, it looks a bit of a mess, but there's good info hidden in there if you look at it a bit:



So the early period, from 1990 to either 2004 or 2007 (some folks say one, some say the other) or even 2009 (if you're looking at it from Florida's perspective), it was strength-on-strength most years. We were good, Florida was good. Between 1990 and 2004, we won 6 times, Florida 9 times. In their favor, for sure, but still a fair balance of the programs.

Then we went into our Dark Ages. A few years later, starting 2011, Florida began following us down. We just didn't notice because we started falling earlier, and were falling faster. It also wasn't entirely evident because guys like Muschamp, McElwain, and Mullen could find ways to get double digit win seasons from time to time. Our best counterpart to them, Butch Jones, had a 9-win ceiling.

And here's the key to the transition from the second period to the third in that graph: we rose out of our Dark Ages starting in 2021. Florida is still wallowing around in theirs. On the graph, watch for this: Florida has only twice before gone two years in a row with fewer wins than the Vols: 97-98, our last year with Peyton followed by the national championship season with Tee at the helm ... and 03-04, the Ron Zook experiment.

But we're there now: we have more wins (significantly more) than Florida in 2022 and 2023, and it seems almost certain we're going to have more in 2024 as well. That has not happened in the past 34 years, three years in a row with our W column being bigger than theirs.

It's because we've risen out of our dark period, but Florida hasn't yet.

So: first time window, from '90 to somewhere around '04 or '07 or '09, it's championship caliber vs championship caliber.

Then from that point to 2020, it's weak versus weak (but Tennessee is the weaker).

And now, since 2021, it's championship caliber versus weak.

And here's to hoping that lasts another couple of decades, heh.

As to the point in the OP, unfortunately as long as we're in a strong-versus-weak window, beating Florida isn't necessarily going to be a harbinger of much for the season as a whole. As Franklin said, we'll just have beat a middling SEC team.

Go Vols!

 

[Jaxon_Vol2017]

If we play as good as we did the first half of the Oklahoma game and the last quarter of the Florida game, we can beat Alabama. We're so wildly inconsistent on offense, it's really hard to predict a win.

 

[Nico ee-ah-MAH-LAY-ah-va]

If we play as good as we did the first half of the Oklahoma game and the last quarter of the Florida game, we can beat Alabama. We're so wildly inconsistent on offense, it's really hard to predict a win.

Bama is the same way. If they come out like they did in that first half of the UGA game, then we are in trouble. If they come out like they did in the second half, or Vandy, or even SCAR, then we have an opportunity.