Tennessee’s been better than its record, and Northwestern hasn’t. They meet in the Outback

Forget the “go into a shell in the second quarter” play-calling. Forget Florida’s desperate fourth-down touchdown. Forget the blown leads and the repeated symptoms that held Tennessee back. Focus on this:

Comfortable wins against decent teams, combined with tight losses to good teams, is a sign of a pretty good team. A perusal of UT’s latest depth chart, with 12 freshman and sophomores and only five seniors among 22 starters, shows this team should expect to improve.

Butch Jones’ steady rebuild is going as planned. From 5-7 to 7-6 to a chance at 9-4, Jones’ Vols have stepped up the ladder every year. While they don’t grade out as well as last year in S&P+ (19th in 2014, currently 24th in 2015), they sustained the leap, and they’ll have a chance to take another step.

In one-possession games in 2015, Tennessee is 2-4 and Northwestern is 5-0. The former has allowed for space on the Tennessee bandwagon, and the latter has given a subpar-on-paper team a top-15 poll ranking.

If this game is close, the things I told you to forget will come flooding back into memory. But Tennessee’s defensive advantages are bigger than Northwestern’s, and if the Vols build a double-digit lead -- as they are wont to do -- the Wildcats may not have the firepower to catch up.

This isn’t an opportunity for the breakthrough win Tennessee is starving for, but it is a chance to prove the Vols have time to deliver such a thing next fall.

In 2015, Northwestern was the intersection between résumé and play-to-play, game-to-game quality. The Wildcats began by beating Stanford and claimed the scalps of five other bowl teams along the way. They lost only to Michigan in Ann Arbor and to 12-1 Iowa at home. They went 10-2 in an improved Big Ten. That’s a hell of a résumé.

But there’s the actual quality. The deeper you dig, the less the numbers like Pat Fitzgerald’s squad.

Win expectancy, as shared on Northwestern’s stat profile, looks at the stats from a game and says, “From this game’s stats, you could have expected to win this game X percent of the time.” Northwestern mastered the art of winning coin tosses. Win expectancy said the Wildcats had a 30 percent chance of beating Duke, and they won 19-10. They had a 43 percent chance of beating Penn State and won via last-second field goal. They had a 63 percent chance of beating both a bad Purdue and a ghastly Ball State and won by a combined 12. On average, you would expect to win about two such games, not four.

Then there’s the nature of the losses. Iowa and Michigan combined to beat Northwestern 78-10. Total yardage: Hawkeyes and Wolverines 872, Wildcats 364.

The wins over Stanford and Wisconsin were legitimate, even if you note the two blew multiple opportunities to stay closer or win. And beating Minnesota 27-0 was among the best performances of the year in the Big Ten. But in the other nine games, NU oscillated between easing past or winning coin-flip games against mediocre teams and getting annihilated by good ones. That doesn’t say good things about the sustainability of your success.

But who cares? After going 10-14 in 2013-14 after a supposed breakthrough in 2012, the Wildcats enjoyed a blessed run that was only marred by the back-to-back blowout losses. And while they played with no margin for error, they survived with a redshirt freshman at quarterback, a sophomore feature back, and a defense that featured only five seniors among its 17 leading tacklers.

In 2011, Kansas State won 10 games in the Big 12 with smoke, mirrors, and Bill Snyder’s magic wand. In 2011, the Wildcats won the Big 12 with pure quality. By winning, you get a chance to become your record, and Northwestern will enjoy a happy offseason regardless. If it can stay close to Tennessee, it will have a chance to pull off an Outback Bowl win, but this game is a victory lap.

Check out the monstrous stat preview here.

Both defenses hold significant advantages on standard downs.

Tennessee’s defense ranks only 46th in Standard Downs S&P+ thanks to too many big plays, but Northwestern’s offense ranks an abysmal 111th in SD S&P+ because of a success rate among the nation’s worst.

Tennessee’s offense is pretty good on these downs (37th), but Northwestern’s defense is excellent (17th, second in big-play prevention).

It’s easy to conclude that both teams will find themselves in second-and-long or third-and-medium frequently. The offense that bails itself out more frequently wins.

Here’s where Tennessee builds its advantage. Both the UT O and NU D are solid, but quarterback Joshua Dobbs has been good at either scrambling for yards or catching back up to the chains with his arm -- on third down with at least four yards to go, he’s rushed for 10 first downs, and while he’s completed only 55 percent of his passes in such situations, 78 percent of his completions have gone for first downs.

Northwestern’s Clayton Thorson in the same scenario? Seven first-down rushes, a 48 percent completion rate, and only 32 percent of completions going for first downs.

Northwestern is already preparing to punt when a passing down arises. Tennessee gives it the ol’ college try. That could backfire on the Vols in sacks and turnovers, but on paper, it gives them a clear edge.