It's more psychological when talking about Florida. Over the last 20-25 years, UT has had the better team several times yet....
I thought the same thing but my Dad made a great point, Florida has just had better teams most of those years. I think you had that argument in Phillip Fulmer era but it has been very rare that Tennessee had a better team since then (especially at time of matchup, there were a couple of times when Florida fell apart later that year but it wasn't the same Florida team that played Tennessee).
I posted a forum in Vol Nation about it:
How often has Tennessee been favored against Florida?
I think the only years Tennessee was better and lost were:
Possibly 2014 (I think teams were even and it came down to a last minute FG by Florida),
2015 (hail mary from Florida on 4th and 19 cost us game),
2016 (we won),
2017 (yes we went 0-8 in SEC that year but we had a good team when we played Florida and choked game away starting our slide).
Outside of those games, Florida was way better than us most years. The last year of Derek Dooley had us favored too and we totally and epically collapsed then costing Derek Dooley his job.
Now Fulmer era had a lot of years we choked:
1993
1997
1999
2000
2002 - Entire season was underachieving. We were huge favorite to win SEC.
2005 - Perhaps the worse underachieving season in our school's history. No way that team should have gone 5-6.
Better than Florida all of those years and still lost. Hard to tell in 1995 and 1996 as the teams were very close. Florida had some pretty dang good teams and had Danny Wuerffel (Spurrier's favorite QB) vs. Peyton Manning. (I think Spurrier's system used Danny Wuerffel better than Tennessee utilized Peyton Manning. Florida also had Fred Taylor at Runningback who was a beast).
as well as the classic CBS intro.
