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After Third Straight Loss, What Does Tennessee Do Now?

The Volunteers have lost three straight, all in the SEC, and a program that was supposed to be back is now reeling again.
Photo by Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Of all the years for Tennessee football to get back to an elite level, this one looked like a prime contender. The Vols have the most experienced team in the SEC East, led by senior quarterback Josh Dobbs, and they play in what was expected to be a weak division.

Tennessee needed this to be the year it got to a New Year's Six bowl game, if not the College Football Playoff. It needed to prove that it truly can compete with the best in its conference. Instead, the Vols have laid an egg.

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After inexplicably losing to South Carolina this weekend, Tennessee has three straight losses, including a blowout to rival Alabama, the team the Vols are trying to measure up to. They would have more, too, if not for pulling out a miraculous pair of wins against Appalachian State and Georgia. What once looked like a promising season is turning into a disaster that could very well end with a mid-tier bowl game and no SEC East title.

Right now, Tennessee lags behind both Florida and Kentucky(!) in the division; the Vols have three SEC losses to the Gators' one. Even with the tiebreaker, and even if Tennessee wins one more SEC game than Florida the rest of the season, Florida still wins a downright awful division.

It gets worse. A game against Kentucky in two weeks now turns into a must-win if Tennessee is to at least finish second in the division. The Wildcats are not a good team, but they're better than South Carolina, and the way Tennessee has played this year—constantly digging itself into a hole in the first half—the Wildcats have a chance to win that game.

The grim reality is that Tennessee's most promising season in nearly a decade—and for the foreseeable future, too—seems more destined to end in the TaxSlayer Bowl than even the Citrus Bowl, and more likely to end in the Liberty Bowl against a Conference USA team than in the Sugar Bowl. That's a pretty big failure for coach Butch Jones, and it leaves Tennessee with some questions this off-season.

Jones has preached patience since arriving at Tennessee four years ago, and he's largely gotten it, thanks to impressive recruiting and a hopeful feeling that Vols fans never had under Derek Dooley. Heading into next year without Dobbs, running backs Alvin Kamara and Jalen Hurd, defensive lineman Jonathan Kongbo—Jones just announced that Hurd is transferring, and Kongbo is said to be on the verge of quitting the team—and many more, Tennessee is in rebuilding mode again. All while Florida gets stronger, and while Georgia builds off of its 2016 rebuilding year. And you can forget the Vols being in the same league as Alabama for a while—a goal they had long aspired to.

If Tennessee was going to recapture the glory it attained a decade and a half ago, this was going to be the year. Now that it's clear this isn't going to be the year, and that it's highly unlikely "the year" comes anytime soon, Tennessee has to ask: Is it time to go in another direction again? The program has already seen a lot of rebuilding, but the status quo doesn't inspire confidence for anything else in the near future.