There have been plenty of recent occasions in which Tennessee has been the talk of the college football world for all the wrong reasons.
The tumultuous coaching search of 2017 that followed the firing of Butch Jones. The 2019 opening loss to Georgia State. Martin Luther King Jr. Day of last year, when the school fired Jeremy Pruitt amid university and NCAA investigations.
Not now.
Tennessee's meteoric rise from the ashes in Josh Heupel's 20 months at the helm has resulted in a Saturday afternoon showdown between the No. 11 Volunteers and the No. 20 Gators inside a sold-out Neyland Stadium. The latest chapter between Southeastern Conference Eastern Division rivals not only earned the league's coveted CBS broadcast time slot but a visit from ESPN's "College GameDay" show, with Heupel allowing his players to savor the moment.
"It's impossible to block out the noise in today's world," Heupel said. "It's absolutely impossible. They're going to see it and hear it, and you can't let it affect what matters, which is your preparation.
"Everybody wants to win on game day. You've got to do what it takes to win."
This marks the 10th time ESPN's "College GameDay" has descended on Knoxville, with the Vols 3-6 in the first nine occasions. Tennessee defeated Georgia (1995), Notre Dame (1999) and Florida (2016) with the show broadcasting from campus, but the Vols have lost four times to the Gators (1996, 2000, 2002, 2012) and once to Miami (2002) and Auburn (2004).
When Heupel quarterbacked Oklahoma to the 2000 national championship, the Sooners played five times with "College GameDay" on the scene, including the 31-14 defeat of visiting and top-ranked Nebraska.
"To me, it just means that you're playing in big games, and I'm not sure you realized it during the course of the week," Heupel said. "You kind of felt it on a Friday, because the energy was just a little heightened around campus as you were driving in or coming into the building, and you can certainly feel the excitement and focus on game day from your fan base.
"Those are great memories for me and my teammates back then."
The Vols opened this season with lopsided wins over Ball State (59-10) and Akron (63-6) sandwiching a 34-27 overtime victory at No. 17 Pittsburgh. The Gators opened with a thrilling 29-26 topping of No. 7 Utah but have regressed in the two weeks since, losing to No. 20 Kentucky 26-16 before escaping South Florida 31-28.
This will be Florida's first road game.
"We're very much a work in progress," Gators first-year coach and former Murray County quarterback Billy Napier said, "and we've got a lot of areas on our team where we continually improve. I like the intangibles of this group and the fight of this group, but playing Tennessee on the road is going to present a number of challenges."
The Vols are 1-16 in their past 17 meetings with Florida but opened Sunday as 10.5-point favorites. The line shifted to 11 a couple of times but was back at 10.5 Friday afternoon.
"Our guys have been really good," Heupel said. "The focus has been really good. The practices have been intentional in the way they've approached it.
"The outside noise and the opportunity that's here — you work to have these opportunities."
Century mark
Friday marked the 100-year anniversary of Tennessee wearing orange jerseys for the first time. The Vols broke them out for a 50-0 win over Emory & Henry on Sept. 23, 1922.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.