Tennessee to face Purdue in Music City Bowl

From firing Jeremy Pruitt 11 months ago, to losing 30 players to the transfer portal, to hiring Josh Heupel — it’s been quite the year for Tennessee. And it ends with a trip to the Music City Bowl in Nashville.

The Volunteers will face Purdue on December 30th at Nissan Stadium.

Thanks to a complete offensive overhaul by Heupel, Tennessee was able to put together a 7-5 season. They got back to beating the teams that Tennessee is supposed to beat, toppling South Carolina, Missouri, Vanderbilt and Kentucky, along with three additional non-conference wins.

The Volunteers weren’t supposed to be back to this point this quickly, but here they are.

Purdue finished their season with an 8-4 mark, winning four out of their last five games to close the regular season. Their only loss during that span was to Ohio State. The Boilermakers were able to knock off two top five teams this season, beating Michigan State and Iowa.

Jeff Brohm remains at the helm of the Purdue program. Of course, Brohm’s name was a part of Tennessee’s wild coaching search back in 2017, with one report stating that Tennessee was set to hire Brohm. As you know by now, that didn’t happen, sending the search even further off the rails. Brohm is coming off of his best season in West Lafayette.

Per FPI, Tennessee ranks 22nd while Purdue ranks 25th. The Boilermakers are 32nd in total defense and 49th in total offense. Compare that to Tennessee’s 16th ranked offense and 85th ranked defense, and it appears that we have a pretty good matchup on our hands.

We’ll have much more on this matchup over the next couple of weeks.