7 pm, ESPN
TaxSlayer Gator Bowl
Tennessee v. Indiana
Thanks to some truly rotten luck, the Big Ten is 4-4 in bowls instead of 6-2 and now needs a Hoosier win to get above .500. Their task is to take down the mighty Volunteers of Tennessee. Perhaps the most puzzling movement I've seen this year was the cry for Jeremy Pruitt to win coach of the year in the SEC after going 7-5 with losses to Georgia State and BYU. I read one article that he led "the greatest turnaround in program history" after close wins over Kentucky and Missouri. In any event, Tennessee does play pretty good defense and the Hoosiers can move the ball, although they lost their offensive coordinator so how they move on from that will be a question.
This game, to an extent, reminds me of the Purdue/Auburn game last year in the Music City Bowl... A game that I'm painfully unable to forget.
Essentially it was a team that had punched above its weight to an extent to make it to a bowl game at all at 6-6, against a much more talented (per the STARZ on the roster) team that had a few bad breaks to fall to a 7-5 record.
In some sense it came down to who really wanted to be there (I was hoping Auburn would be disinterested), but if both teams came to play, the talent disparity was ENORMOUS and far too large to overcome. Sadly, the latter scenario happened and Purdue got run off the field.
I don't like this site's methodology (I think it overweights freshmen), but they have the 4-year recruiting ranking of Tennessee at 17th in the nation, and of Indiana at 41st in the nation.
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football-recruiting/2019/2/7/18215228/college-football-recruiting-rankings-2019-classThat's a problem, if Tennessee comes in with a chip on their shoulder.
I suspect that Indiana, by virtue of an easy schedule, is not as good as their 8-4 record would suggest. And Tennessee is a lot more talented than their 7-5 record would imply, considering the team at the end of 2019 would likely have beaten Georgia State to be 9-3 and in a more prominent bowl.