Tennessee opens as road favorite at Florida

It’s officially Florida week for Tennessee, which will be looking for its first win in Gainesville in 20 years. The 11th-ranked Vols (2-0) on Sunday afternoon opened as 8.5-point favorites against the Gators (1-1) in the SEC opener for both teams, according to Caesars Sportsbook – and the line is down to 7.5 points. The point spread is a little closer according to Circa Sports, which installed the Vols as just a four-point favorite when revealing its opening lines for Week 3 of the season.

Tennessee was last favored to win in The Swamp in 2015, when Florida opened as a slight favorite and the line shifted toward making the Vols a 1-point favorite at kickoff. The Vols last won at Florida in 2003. Tennessee’s 38-33 win against its SEC East rivals last season was just the second in 18 meetings for the Vols as the Gators have controlled this series.

You have to go back to 1971 for the last time Tennessee was ranked and Florida was not in this matchup, which features plenty of top-five, top-10 and top-15 meetings in its history, particularly in its heyday in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

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Florida opened the 2023 season with a 24-11 loss at defending two-time Pac-12 champion Utah, but bounced back with a routine victory against McNeese on Saturday at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. The Gators mustered just 13 rushing yards against the Utes, but rolled up a whopping 327 yards on the ground and 6.4 yards per carry against their Football Championship Subdivision opponents. Florida was just 1-of-13 on third down, allowed five sacks and was penalized nine times for 46 yards in a disappointing opener.

Tennessee followed up a 49-13 win against Virginia in Nashville in its opener with a lackluster performance, particularly on offense, in a 30-13 win against Austin Peay, an FCS team that lost its opener by 26 points at Southern Illinois.

The Vols know they must be better to start SEC play, but there should be no lack of motivation to be focused with the first big-game week of the season now here.

“Listen, the job for us is to be the best football team on the field every Saturday,” Vols head coach Josh Heupel said after the Austin Peay game. “You walk off the field and you see the scoreboard and you either accomplished that goal or you didn’t. We’ve got to come back in, we’ve got to learn, reset and grow from it, certainly, as we head into conference play. We’re going to need to be better than we were tonight. Are we capable of doing those things? Yeah, absolutely. They’re really small things. Some of the things at wideout, we’ve seen those guys operate, function and handle all that at a really high level.

“Urgency in how we come back tomorrow afternoon and on Monday is absolutely critical for us. I’ll say this: I didn’t feel like we were unfocused last week. We’ve got to take strides. Obviously the environment will be a good one next week and a good Florida the opponent.”

These programs have gone in different directions since Florida’s 38-14 win against Tennessee in the 2021 meeting in Gainesville. The Vols are 18-6 since that night four games into their first season under Josh Heupel, while the Gators are just 10-14 in that span. Florida started 3-1 and finished 3-6 and fired Dan Mullen in 2021 and went 6-7 in its first season under Billy Napier, who will be looking to jumpstart his tenure with a victory against a top-15 Tennessee team.

“The game is never bigger than it is,” said Vols quarterback Joe Milton III, one of five Florida natives on Tennessee’s roster. “When you prepare the right way, I feel like everything else is going to take care of itself. Tomorrow, you just re-evaluate what happened. Monday, you go back to work. Nothing that happened tonight matters after Sunday, so go back home and you execute. No matter where we’re at, we’re just going to execute.”

Tennessee had not been favored by more than 5.5 points against Florida before last season, when the Vols were a 10.5-point favorite – it was just the seventh time Tennessee was favored against Florida dating back to 1997.