A Tennessean with the numbers on our teams, our cities and what we pay for.

I'm Nick Wilson. I hold Tennessee's teams to a championship standard, and I do it as a fan who buys the tickets.

The standard

The goal is championships. A good year that ends in January does not count.

Every piece here answers one question. What would have to be true for this team to win it all. Then it names who has to close that gap and over what horizon.

Why the bar sits there

The support has already been supplied, and the figures are checkable.

Neyland carries a streak of 27 consecutive sellouts into this season. Season tickets have sold out four straight years, all 70,500 of them. The waiting list for the ones that never open up sits at 29,414 names.

Tennessee athletics generated $304,117,509 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025. Fourth revenue record in a row, and roughly $70 million above the year before it.

Nashville approved a $2.1 billion stadium for the Titans. $1.26 billion of that was public money, the largest public contribution to an NFL stadium at the time it passed.

What it has produced

Tennessee baseball won the 2024 College World Series, the first national title in program history. Same athletic department, same money, same fans. The standard is reachable here and one program has already reached it.

The rest of the list reads differently.

The Vols last won a football national championship in 1998.

The Titans have played one Super Bowl, after the 1999 season, and lost it. Their last playoff win came in the 2019 season. They finished 3-14 in each of the last two.

The Predators have reached one Stanley Cup Final, in 2017, and have never won one.

The Grizzlies have never reached the NBA Finals. One conference finals appearance, in 2013.

The Braves won the 2021 World Series. Tennessee has no MLB team and I did what everybody here did.

That distance is the subject. Every chart on this site is a measurement of it.

Three rules that hold this up

Decisions and results, never character. A fourth down call is measurable. Work ethic is not, and guessing at it would undo the whole point.

Accountability runs upward. Front offices, athletic departments, head coaches, ownership. Players get their performance measured and nothing beyond it. Vols players are college kids and are never the target here.

Numbers do not bend to the rooting interest. The homerism lives in the framing and in the hope. The measurement is honest every week, including the weeks it hurts.

One thing follows from those. When a number is good the piece says so flat, with no pivot to whatever is broken. A championship yardstick sorts onto both sides and plenty of Tennessee numbers land on the good one.

How I work

I pull every number fresh the day a piece goes up, and I list where it came from. When two sources disagree, I say so.

If a finding rests on a small sample, I tell you up front.

Every piece has at least one number I worked out myself. The national sites have plenty of numbers, and the Tennessee argument is what I add.

When I get one wrong, I say so where I posted it.

What gets covered

Titans, Vols football, Vols basketball, Predators, Grizzlies, Nashville SC, and the Braves. Tennessee Tech, the Sounds, and Vanderbilt show up when they earn it.

Who writes it

I'm Nick Wilson, in Nashville. I do analytics for a living and have watched the Titans lose in most of the ways there are to lose. I want Tennessee to win, and the numbers come out the same either way.

5 of my first 10 pieces had a number wrong. I went back through every source, fixed all 5 on the posts, and every number gets checked before a piece goes out now.