I've mentioned before that I see any football team as a range of possibilities. On any given week, the best version of the team can show up, or the worst version, or anything in between. We are talking about 125 college kids, after all.
In my mind, a team's potential looks sort of like this fuzzy cloud:
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The center bar is what most of us talk about each week when we say team A is better or worse than team B. But that is really just an average of their potential.
We've also talked on these boards about how powerful a force discipline is in football. The more discipline a team has, the less mystery in "which team shows up this week." The more predictably they perform, however good that may be. Discipline doesn't make a bad team good, but it makes them less prone to being even worse some weeks. In my mind's eye, here's how that looks -- comparing an average team (left) with a really sloppy, undisciplined one (middle), and finally a very well-disciplined squad (right):
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Every coach wants the disciplined outfit, of course. Notice that the
top ends of those examples are aligned; you can't be better than your best. Lack of discipline can only make you less good than whatever your best is.
So now, taking this way of looking at a team's potential and applying it to the 2022 season:
There are some teams on the schedule I know almost nothing about: Ball State, Akron, UT Martin. One has to assume average levels of discipline for them, absent any insight. One also has to assume that they play at a G5 or FCS level, barring any indicators to the contrary.
We know more--a lot more--about several of our more frequent opponents. Florida, for instance, has been an undisciplined mess these last several years. And have bled talent. LSU also might be expected to show less discipline than average, having a new coach (most teams with a new coaching staff will be lower on the discipline scale). Finally, Mizzou has shown themselves to have low discipline the least couple of years. At the other end of that scale, Bama and UGa have made discipline an important part of their team culture. We'll assume everyone else on the schedule is, like our team, about average on the discipline variable.
As for how good each team is compared to the Vols, I think we'd mostly all agree that Bama and UGa have a significant edge on us. LSU less so, but still notable. We're probably about even with Pitt. And I would've said about even with Florida if they hadn't imploded so badly and bled so much talent last off-season. They're kind of a wreck right now. Everyone else on the schedule is well below our level.
And I'm talking about the entire team when I say "level." Not just talent, it's not as simple as counting stars or blue chips. I mean the coaching staff, too, and the scheme, and the intangibles like cohesiveness and willingness to sacrifice for each other.
Anyway, when I chart it all out, it comes out looking kinda like this:
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That's how I see 2022 in my mind. A few notes about it:
1. It's not gonna tell me how to vote against Vegas. You can find anything from 11-1 to 7-5 in there (6-6 if you really wanted to argue Kentucky's slim-slim chances of showing up with their very best A-game against our most putrid, undisciplined version of ourselves). So this isn't predicting 8-4, the way my head says, or 9-3, the way my heart is leaning. It is annoyingly imprecise. But I think that makes it paradoxically even more accurate a reflection of how football really works.
2. It's kind of easy to see the season playing out like a melody. Characterized by three rising scales (Ball State-Pitt, followed by Akron-FL-LSU-Bama, followed in turn by UTM-KY-UGa), with a denouement ending in Mizzou-USCe-Vandy. I particularly appreciate the rising nature of the Akron-to-Bama series, as each week will serve as a tune-up for a somewhat greater challenge the following week.
3. We really have to hope the basket-case version of Florida shows up. It seems over the past couple of decades, we've always arrived at something between our average selves and our worst, while they usually showed up at or near the top of their potential. We're better than them this year, but we need to be on our game to guarantee ourselves a W.
4. Pitt and LSU are the keystone games of the season. They are the two teams most akin to us in overall capacity to find victory. Given that we could slip up somewhere else along the way (we're not yet THAT disciplined), those two games mean the difference between a very good season, and an acceptable but just okay one.
~ ~ ~
Anyway, that's how I think of our odds. It's never so simple as "we're better than them, we'll beat them." It's like collapsing the wave form in quantum mechanics; most football teams are in a superposition of states until they get measured by being put on the field against another team.
Go Vols!
