Consider this bye week filler, but there continues to be a lot of talk about whether Butch has exceeded or under performed what he should be doing at UT.
Although the spread is intended to even out betting and not necessarily predict outcomes, it does reflect pretty accurately what a majority of people think will happen. So we can look at how Butch has done against the spread. In all cases I only list games that went against expectations.
2013 - We beat USC jr at +7, but lost to Vandy at -2
2014 - We lost to Florida at -2, and also lost to Missouri at -4, but beat USC jr at +6
2015 - We beat uga at + 1, lost to Arkansas at -6. I don't know how to count these, but we lost to both OU and Florida at Even. Split the difference and call it one loss?
2016 - All games have gone as expected
I don't know what the lines were in the bowl games, so I left those out.
Just looking at what team was expected to win, Vols have exceeded expectations once per year excluding this year (three tiems total), and failed to meet expectations 5 times total, once in 2013 and twice each in 2014 and 2015. Our upsets have been USC jr twice and then uga last year.
I guess using this as a measure, Butch has slightly underperformed.
Having said that, Vandy was good in 2013 but bettors are slow to change their perceptions, and I am not sure I should count either of the even games from 2014 as a loss (I only counted one).
The only real surprise for me was that we were favored against Mizzou in 2014. Somehow that doesn't seem right, but it was probably a bettor overeaction to our win at USC jr.
Oh well...something to do on a bye week.