Vandy’s odds getting smaller on paper, but still steep

It’s been about three years since Vandy has won back-to-back games. The last time was in 2008 when we beat Ole Miss in Oxford and then Auburn at home on GameDay.

Our last back-to-back home wins came earlier that same season when we beat South Carolina and then Rice.

Lots of folks think we’ll get it done. We opened as 5.5-point underdogs to Connecticut and have now dropped — or climbed, I guess — to 1-point underdogs, with an over/under of 44 points.

This is going to be a tough, tough game, folks. We can win, but don’t expect us to crush the Huskies. Up front, they’re huge on both sides of the ball. It will be a particularly big challenge for our O-line. They return nine starters on defense and have some big cornerbacks.

It’ll be a big, big test for our offense.

UConn is the kind of team that, historically, we as fans expect to beat because it’s not a big-name team, and it’s the kind of team that, historically, cleans our clock. They beat us when they’d been in Division I for just a year, and now they’re a BCS team (albeit in the worst of all the conferences with an automatic bid.

Oh, and if we do end up being favored in Saturday’s game, don’t forget that historically we seem to perform better as underdogs.

I’m saying this so that (1) we’ll appreciate what we’ve done if we do win and (2) we want all go jump off a bridge if we don’t.

But clearly, this is a team we need to beat if we have hopes of going to a bowl. Should we even have our hopes set so high? I say sure, as long as we don’t go hatin’ on the players and staff if we don’t win this game and our bowl hopes are dashed around midseason.