KNOXVILLE - Brian Randolph perhaps best summed up his Tennessee football career early Monday afternoon without even knowing it.
"I don't think I ever had a four-game win streak here," the senior safety said.
Early in the careers of Randolph and six other fifth-year players, winning four games in an entire season was a struggle for the Volunteers.
That group, which came to Tennessee to play for coach Derek Dooley and will leave under Butch Jones, closes their careers with a chance at a nine-win season if the Vols beat Vanderbilt at home in Saturday's regular-season finale and wins a second consecutive bowl game.
Tennessee's Brian Randolph (37) gestures to the crowd after he was ejected from the game for targeting. The South Carolina Gamecocks visited the Tennessee Volunteers in SEC football action November 7, 2015."We're leaving Tennessee in a better place," Randolph said.
"It's just confidence," he said later after he was asked how the program is different now than when he got to Knoxville. "When I got here we were just hoping to win. Now I feel like every single game we go out there and expect to win. In the beginning of the year when we didn't win, it was like it was a big surprise to us. I just think our mentality's changed."
Tennessee hasn't won eight games in a season since 2007, when Phillip Fulmer's penultimate team won the SEC's East Division and lost in the league title game to eventual national champion LSU.
That season was the last time the Vols won five straight games and the last time they had a winning SEC record.
All of those achievements are in play Saturday afternoon, when the Vols go for win No. 8 against the Commodores.
"It would mean a lot to this program," junior quarterback Josh Dobbs said. "My class talked about getting Tennessee back on the map when we got here. That's what we're striving for every day, and (we're) working hard to get there.
"We know it's a one-game season, and we know we have to come ready to play, or Vanderbilt can come out and give us a shot and beat us. We have to be ready to go, be ready to play and be disciplined in our preparation this week."
Is 8-4 the season Tennessee wanted to have in 2015 and wants to have moving forward? No. Even if they weren't up front about publicly, the Vols were eyeing a division title this season.
They'll take aim at that and more next season and beyond, but this still could be Tennessee's most successful season in eight years.
"I feel like everybody's goal in my class and the class after me was to leave Tennessee in a better place than it was when we got here, and I feel like we're on our way to do that now," redshirt sophomore defensive tackle Kendal Vickers said. "It's obviously not done yet. We have a lot of work to do, but I feel like we're on our way to doing that.
"It makes things a lot easier, but we know we have a lot more work to do and we've got to work that much harder to get where we want to be, because we know it's not going to be easy."
For Randolph and the remaining players from the 2011 signing class, it's rarely been easy.
Tennessee went 5-7 and missed out on bowl games in 2011 and 2012 - Randolph tore his ACL three games into that season - and 2013.
After last season's 7-6 mark included a late surge and a bowl win, there were high hopes the Vols finally would turn the corner this season, but they squandered away wins with fourth-quarter collapses against Oklahoma and Florida, the latter likely serving as the loss that kept Tennessee from topping the SEC East.
The Vols didn't let the disappointment of a 2-3 start send their season off the rails.
"We had that analogy where you're digging for gold," Randolph said. "You may hit the shovel 100 times, and you needed to hit it 101 times and you've got the gold. We've been looking at that. You don't quit. You never know, you could be right there. We were just a couple of plays from being undefeated. We knew we weren't going to quit when we got so close."
Tennessee hasn't turned the corner completely during his career, but Randolph, a former three-star prospect and Gatorade player of the year in Georgia, firmly believes the Vols are much closer to it than they were when he arrived.
And there's some personal pride for him in having a role in getting the program there.
"We're pretty much there, aside from not finishing a couple of games this year," Randolph said. "Our guys know what kind of talent we have and what's going to be expected next year. Once we finish out this year, I'm expecting big things from my teammates next year."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.