The Tennessee Volunteers have been winning nearly 80% of their football games since the start of the 2022 season.
They have not, however, been known as road warriors, and that’s something the No. 6 Vols are looking to remedy Saturday (7:30 p.m. Eastern on ABC) when they visit No. 15 Oklahoma in this year’s Southeastern Conference opener for both teams. It’s also the inaugural SEC pairing for the Sooners, who moved over from the Big 12 this season.
“The first SEC game brings a lot of energy in itself,” Tennessee fifth-year senior defensive tackle Omari Thomas said this week, “but we’ve said all offseason that we want to be a team that can win on the road and can go into hostile environments and be the same team that we are in home games.”
Tennessee is 3-0 this season and is on a five-game winning streak dating to last November, but all five of those victories either transpired inside Neyland Stadium or at neutral locations. The two neutral-site triumphs certainly qualify as impressive, with the Vols skunking Iowa 35-0 in January’s Citrus Bowl and routing North Carolina State 51-10 in Charlotte on Sept. 7.
Yet last November also contained Tennessee’s most recent road game, which resulted in a 36-7 loss at Missouri.
The Vols are 2-5 in their past seven road contests, with the two wins a 56-0 rout at Vanderbilt in the 2022 regular-season finale and last October’s 33-27 outlasting of Kentucky at Kroger Field. Tennessee has lost five straight road games in front of crowds exceeding 62,000, with all five decided by double digits.
“Our mindset is to flush whatever has happened before and move on to the next thing and be able to win,” Thomas said. “This is our first hostile game this season, and they’re going to make plays, which is what you expect good teams to do. When adversity hits, we’ve got to continue to be who we are and fall back on our training.”
Road victories actually helped the Josh Heupel era experience success sooner than expected, as the 2021 Vols walloped Missouri 62-24 in Columbia and toppled Kentucky 45-42 in Lexington. That Wildcats team wound up winning 10 games.
One of Tennessee’s most resounding wins under Heupel was a 40-13 rout of LSU in Baton Rouge two years ago, which served as a springboard to an 11-2 season that culminated with an Orange Bowl downing of Clemson. Road victories then began to dry up, as an upset loss at South Carolina late in that 2022 season would be followed by setbacks last season at Florida, Alabama and Missouri.
In those three road defeats a year ago, the Vols averaged 9.0 penalties and 76.3 penalty yards per contest. That impacted their 7.8 penalties a game for the season, which ranked 129th nationally, and they committed pre-snap miscues on three consecutive possessions at Florida, which helped turn a 7-0 lead into a 26-7 deficit in an eventual 29-16 loss.
“I wouldn’t say that a lack of communication has plagued us on the road,” fifth-year senior center Cooper Mays said. “It kind of just plagues everybody in general. Every away game is going to be a challenge, especially in this league, and the fans are always going to show up and be rowdy.
“We’ve just got to hone in on the details and communicate well.”
When Missouri and Texas A&M made their SEC debuts at home against league opposition in 2012, they were spoiled by Georgia and Florida, respectively. Tennessee is looking to be the spoiler on Saturday in an early season showdown that contains significant ramifications for the inaugural 12-team edition of the College Football Playoff.
It’s also an opportunity for these Vols to prove they’re not last year’s Vols when it comes to competing inside a combative venue.
“There is something special about knowing that you are going on the road and just the focus and the effort that it takes to go out there and be successful in those types of environments,” Heupel said. “That is something special that competitors relish. This is a huge test for us.
“It’s an opportunity for us to go on the road in a really good environment and at the same time have an opportunity to put our brand in front of the entire country.”
Odds and ends
Tennessee on its first availability report for Saturday’s game listed sophomore left tackle Lance Heard, who was held out of last weekend’s 71-0 drubbing of Kent State, as questionable. … The Vols will wear white jerseys and white pants in Norman.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.