The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football program had a bit of a market correction following the 2024 season.
Despite a mass exodus to the transfer portal, where only a couple of starters returned from a 7-5 2024 campaign, the Mocs were selected second in the 2025 Southern Conference media poll. The staff knew that was probably too high, but those were the rankings and the patched-together roster stumbled through a rough early-season schedule and started 1-4 before salvaging things and finishing with a respectable 5-7 campaign.
A year later, the Mocs returned over half of their starters from that campaign — a year stronger, a year wiser, a year better — but with the top of the SoCon looking as strong as ever and there still being some unknowns about UTC, the league picked the Mocs fifth.
And honestly? That’s probably where they need to be at the beginning of the year, even though they expect to be much better.
“Seeing our team together a lot earlier than we did last year, it does get us a little bit excited,” linebacker Zion Rutledge, one of seven Mocs to earn preseason All-SoCon honors and one of four to get a first-team nod, said Tuesday.