Tennessee, meanwhile, has looked every bit the ranked team it is through 2 weeks, opening with a 56-9 rout of Furman before going on the road and beating Georgia Tech 45-24. True freshman Faizon Brandon has run the offense both times, and at Georgia Tech he threw for 148 yards and 2 touchdowns while adding 22 yards on the ground in his first career road start.
Kennesaw State's own season has gone the other direction. The Owls opened with West Georgia and then dropped their most recent game to Georgia State, leaving them 0-2 heading into Knoxville. A trip to a top-15 SEC program was never going to be an easy spot to try to turn that around, and the roster gap here is about as wide as it gets on a college football Saturday.
Neyland Stadium at 84 degrees and partly cloudy is about as normal a September Saturday as it gets, so there's no weather angle to lean on for either side. What decides how ugly this gets is mostly about how long Heupel keeps his starters in, since Tennessee has already shown in the Furman game that it isn't interested in running the score up once things get out of hand.
For Kennesaw State, there's at least a story worth watching regardless of score: a program that didn't have a football team a decade ago walking into an SEC building for the first time, coached by a guy who used to work there. That's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in a box score, but it's the reason this game exists on the schedule at all.