Last year, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team played 10 consecutive weeks from the start of September until early November before its lone open date of the season.
This season, UTC has arrived at its bye week much, much earlier — and not a moment too soon for the Mocs, whose struggles on offense have led to the program’s first 0-3 start since 2017.
Some of that is certainly due to the difficulty of the early portion of UTC’s schedule, a three-game stretch that now appears even more challenging than expected considering what the opposition has accomplished so far.
The Football Championship Subdivision’s Mocs opened with back-to-back road losses to upper-level Football Bowl Subdivision programs Tennessee, 69-3, and Georgia State, 24-21, before Saturday’s 10-3 home loss to Mercer to start Southern Conference play. Tennessee is 3-0 with a cumulative season score of 191-13 and ranked sixth in The Associated Press Top 25 poll released Sunday as the Volunteers head into their Southeastern Conference opener; Georgia State, a Sun Belt school, earned a home win against the SEC’s Vanderbilt on Saturday night to improve to 2-1 (with the Panthers’ loss at Atlantic Coast Conference program Georgia Tech); and Mercer is set to rise in the FCS rankings with a 3-0 start in which the Bears outscored their competition 104-15.
(Note: Mercer, after seven decades without a football program, returned to competition in 2013 and joined the SoCon the following season. Since then, the Bears are 6-5 against UTC, tied with Furman for the best record by a league member against the Mocs in that span.)