Volunteers

Six national championships sit on the Volunteers' record, but the one that finished the job cleanest came in 1998, when Phillip Fulmer's team went 13–0 and beat Florida State 23–16 in the Fiesta Bowl without a single blemish on the season. It capped a run that had started decades earlier, back when Robert Neyland built the program into something opponents feared: his 1939 side went through an entire regular season without allowing a point, a mark no major college team has matched since.

Tennessee grew out of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1891, old enough that the school's colours, orange and white, had time to earn a nickname of their own — Big Orange, worn now alongside the Vols' six national titles and thirteen Southeastern Conference championships. The Southern Conference and Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association crowns that preceded those thirteen belong to an earlier version of the sport, before the SEC existed to organise it.

The rivalry that matters most is played on the third Saturday in October, against Alabama; the one played longest, for a trophy called the Beer Barrel, is against Kentucky. Between those two fixtures the Vols have supplied the Pro Football Hall of Fame with players like Reggie White and Doug Atkins, and Neyland Stadium has held crowds beyond 100,000 to watch them try to add to that list.

Johnny Majors brought the program back from a quiet stretch in the 1980s, capped by a Sugar Bowl win over Miami in 1985, and Josh Heupel has been rebuilding it again since 2021 after a decade of turnover following Fulmer's departure. But no name from Knoxville travels further than Peyton Manning's — a quarterback who never won the title he chased there, yet remains the player the Vols are introduced by.