Greg McElroy reacts to Tennessee's 2024 SEC schedule

Earlier this week, the SEC announced the conference’s 2024 football schedule. One of the most interesting schedules was that of the Tennessee Volunteers, who are expected to be one of the SEC’s top teams moving forward.

College football analyst Greg McElroy reacted to the Volunteers’ schedule following the announcement on his show, Always College Football.

“Tennessee, you get to keep Alabama,” McElroy said. “You get to keep Florida, you get to keep Kentucky, you get to keep Georgia. Tennessee’s schedule, I thought, was gettable. But, then again, most of their difficult games are at home.”

Tennessee will have road games at Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Vanderbilt in 2024. The Volunteers’ home games are going to be against Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, and Mississippi State. It’s a schedule that contains a lot of the team’s SEC East rivals and preserves the game against Alabama.

This ability to preserve rivalries is something that impressed McElroy.

“They go to Georgia in ’24, but either way, I’m glad that they preserved the rivalries because I didn’t realize this,” McElroy said. “I didn’t think about it, I guess, Tennessee, everyone seems to consider LSU, everyone seems to consider Florida, and everyone seems to consider Tennessee a rival. They have more rivalries than pretty much anybody in the entire league. They also get Vanderbilt on the road as well, another team that considers Tennessee a massive rival, but that one’s within the state. That one makes a little bit more sense.”

How can Tennessee contend for a championship?

The 2022 season was great for Tennessee. Winning 11 games and the Orange Bowl was one of the best seasons in recent memory for the Volunteers. However, the goal in Knoxville is to win championships. To do that, the Volunteers need to improve the team defensively.

On3’s JD PicKell explained this on The Hard Count.

“The big thing for Tennessee, this is nice and you’d like the offense to be explosive, but you saw the offense be explosive last year. A lot of good things happened, but now you set your sights on an SEC title, and getting back into that College Football Playoff conversation. That’s what Tennessee sees as the next step. They’re not here to be in the conversation. They want to actually make some noise here and get in the dance. The way that that happens is the defense gets about five to ten percent better,” PicKell said.

“Depending on how much improvement you see on the defensive side of the football, I’m going to be real with you, I don’t know that you need to have 44 points per game offensively. It’d be nice. You’d like to see them live in that 40 points a game range, but the offense doesn’t need to be as good as it was last year. I mean, you’re scoring 40 points a game versus 44 points a game, you’re probably living in the same kind of world anyway. If the defense improves, that’s where things get exciting for Tennessee.”