Tennessee has the 4th-best offense in the country. Not 4th in the SEC. 4th nationally, out of all 138 FBS teams, 97th percentile. Only Oregon, Ohio State, and Notre Dame project better. That is what Bill Connelly’s final preseason SP+ says, and it deserves to be said plainly before anything else.
The defense is good too. 44th of 138, 67th percentile, better than the national average by rating. Nobody should read 44th as a problem unit.
So why is SP+ only 14th overall rather than top five? Because the rating blends both sides, and at this altitude good is not the bar. Oregon pairs its elite offense with the 2nd defense. Ohio State with the 1st. Notre Dame with the 9th. Tennessee pairs it with the 44th, and that is the widest offense-to-defense gap of any team in the SP+ top 25. The median gap up there is 7. Tennessee’s is 40. I checked whether ranks were exaggerating it, and they are not. In standard deviations from the national mean the offense sits 1.93 above and the defense 0.52 above, a gap of 1.41 against a top-25 median of 0.40.
One thing worth knowing if you ever read these numbers yourself.
Defensive SP+ runs on a lower-is-better scale. Tennessee’s 22.4 sits below a national mean of 26.2, which means better, not worse. I read that sign backwards on my first pass and it turned a good defense into a bad one. It got caught before publish by recomputing rather than trusting the sentence. Flagging it because it is the easiest mistake to make with this stat, and because you should know when I get one wrong.
Which leaves one question worth arguing about between now and September.
What would have to be true. Get that defense into the twenties, hold the offense where it projects, and this stops being a 14th-ranked team. That is the whole season in one sentence, and it is a very reachable sentence.
One caveat I owe you. Preseason SP+ is a prior built on returning production and recruiting, and it has watched this team play zero snaps. Every sub-component comes back empty this time of year. The first real data arrives in two weeks.
Full piece, both charts, and the sources are at threestarstats.com.
I’m a fan of these teams, not a neutral observer.