Tennessee 2025 Season Win Total Prediction
It's time to finally make my final prediction for the Tennessee Volunteers this season.
Tennessee kicks off its 2025 season against Syracuse inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Saturday afternoon. After what has been a very long and very exhausting offseason for the Volunteers' football program, it’s finally time for head football coach Josh Heupel’s Vols to go out and play.
I have not revealed my final record prediction for Tennessee this season on the radio, on the podcast, or in this newsletter. I’ve danced around nine wins, or eight wins, and even seven wins. I have not, however, danced around ten or six wins. It’s always been somewhere in that seven-to-nine range. In 2021, the Vols won six regular-season games. In 2023, they won eight. Will this be the year the Vols win more than eight regular-season games with road games at Alabama and Florida on the docket? Tennessee, through four seasons under Heupel, reminds me of the San Francisco Giants in the early 2010s. The latter had something that was coined “Even-Year Magic”, as the team won all three of their World Series titles in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Heupel has won double-digit games, 21 overall, in his two even years at Tennessee, while he has won 16 in his odd-number seasons on Rocky Top.
Something has to give here, right? Perhaps Heupel breaks through and wins a game he has not yet won while at Tennessee, that being Georgia in either venue or on the road at Florida or Alabama. Tennessee is likely to be favored in nine games this fall. Before the start of the 2023 season, the vast majority of Tennessee sports media predicted the Vols to go 8-4 or 9-3. The Vols went 8-4. Tennessee winning eight or nine games this fall feels right, as betting markets set Tennessee’s win-loss projection post-Nico Iamaleava at 8.5 wins.
If Tennessee wins more than that 8.5 number this season, it will have more to do with the defense than the offense, I suspect. ESPN’s SP+ final preseason projection model had the Vols’ defensive SP+ rating at No. 4 in FBS – one spot higher than Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs. In 2023, ESPN’s Bill Connely SP+ projection had Tennessee No. 6 overall. More interestingly, his model had Tennessee as the No. 2 offense and the No. 32 defense – those projections are flipped this season, with the Vols projected to be the No. 33 offense and No. 4 defense in SP+ this season. Tennessee had the No. 51 passing offense in 2023 and was one of the worst teams in FBS in scoring touchdowns once they reached the Red Zone, coming in at 106th nationally. Tennessee was 79th in points per game in conference play that season, too. Quite simply, the Vols’ offense was nowhere near that preseason No. 2 projection for a variety of different reasons.
The story is the same, though, this fall. It’s just flipped. If the Vols are a top-four defense in 2025, the floor is extremely high with this team. In 2024, every school that finished in the top eight in scoring defense won double-digit games – Ohio State was No. 1 and the Buckeyes parlayed that defensive dominance into a national championship. The Vols were No. 7 and won ten games, too. We can talk forever about the wide receivers, the offensive line, and the quarterback questions in Knoxville this fall, but we have seen Heupel win 19 games over the last two years with all sorts of offensive issues and question marks. However, when the Vols were the No. 7 team in FBS in scoring defense, they won ten games in the regular season. When the Vols were No. 22 in scoring defense in 2023, they won eight games.
If Tennessee ends the odd-year skid, it’s because the defense is even better than a season ago. It means Caleb Herring or Jordan Ross burst onto the scene off the edge and snag eight-plus sacks. It means freshmen Ethan Utley and Isaiah Campbell hold the fort down in the interior until Daevin Hobbs returns. It means Jermod McCoy is back sooner rather than later at cornerback. It means Edwin Spillman stays healthy all season and becomes a dominant force alongside defensive leaders Arion Carter and Jeremiah Telander. It means Boo Carter plays a bunch of snaps at STAR and returns punts for the Vols. The path to a top-4 defense is there for defensive coordinator Tim Banks this fall. It’s just a bit more mercurial when you toss Hobbs, Carter, and McCoy’s situations into the mix.
So I’m going under on the win-loss projection for Tennessee in 2025. If the defense were a bit healthier and Boo’s situation were a bit clearer, I might have gone over here. I don’t think this defense is a top-4 unit in 2025, but I don’t believe it falls to twenty-second like that 2023 unit did either. Somewhere in the teens seems most realistic. I also think the offense will be a bit better than thirty-third with better tackle play and a potentially elite group of tight ends. The floor is still very high for the Vols in 2025, but I don’t think this is a double-digit win team.
Give me Tennessee to go 8-4 this season, where the team finishes No. 13 in defense in SP+ and No. 25 in offense.