Tennessee will pay Furman $500,000 for the Sept. 5 game at Neyland Stadium, with the guarantee due within 60 days after kickoff. The 18th-ranked Vols are set to meet Furman at 3:30 p.m. ET on +/SEC Network+.
The payment is part of Tennessee's 2026 nonconference home schedule, which carries more than $1.5 million in guarantees. The Vols also pay $1.05 million to Kennesaw State for the Sept. 19 game, another sign of how expensive a home schedule can be even before conference play begins.
The matchup is the third meeting between Tennessee and Furman, but the road to this one has been unusually long. Furman athletics director Mike Buddie and UT AD Dave Hart signed the original contract in 2016 for a game that was supposed to be played in 2020, and the COVID pandemic pushed it back to the 2026 season. By the time the teams finally play, UT AD Danny White and Furman AD Jason Donnelly will have carried the deal across two athletic department regimes.
That delay is the friction in the story. A game arranged for one season has sat on the books for years, then resurfaced in a different scheduling era, when the SEC's move to a nine-game conference slate leaves only three nonconference opponents needed each year. Tennessee is fully booked through 2029, still needs one more nonconference game in 2030 and two more in 2031, and the Furman payment lands in the middle of that wider squeeze.
For Tennessee, the immediate question is simple: a home game that cost $500,000 in 2016 terms is now part of a crowded future board that already stretches years ahead. For Furman, the payoff arrives after a long wait, and for both schools the contract finally turns into a game on Sept. 5.
