Winning the SEC East is difficult.

Peyton Manning won more Super Bowls than SEC East division titles.

Keep that in mind throughout the silly season, when the magazines and polls and writers shower Tennessee with preseason praise, proclamations and banners that don’t yet exist.

Also know this: While nothing is guaranteed, in 2016, you’d rather be a Vols fan than any other in the division.

This season will go one of two ways for Tennessee: The Vols will celebrate their first SEC East title since 2007 … or they’ll spend the next decade talking about the season that should have been.

Create a checklist and compare it across the division. Based on what Tennessee has and what others lack, almost everything tilts in the Vols’ favor.

Best returning quarterback? Check.

Best healthy returning running back? Check.

Best key juniors who returned for senior season? Check.

Most potential for improvement in passing game among contenders? Check.

Most returning starters? Check.

Most returning starters on the offensive line? Check.

All-SEC caliber players on every level of the defense? Check.

Best return man in the SEC, possibly college football? Check.

Most tenure among contending coaches? Check.

Most motivated team to atone for failing to close out four fourth-quarter leads in 2015? Check.

That’s enough checks to fill in the Vols’ end zone, which is where the offense plans on spending quite a bit of time in 2016.

Since arriving, Butch Jones has been building toward a season like 2016. Not every team can handle the lofty expectations Tennessee will face. Auburn certainly didn’t last season.

Tennessee won nine games last season. It lost four, all four in which it led late, all four by a combined 17 points. That’s how close they were from being great, instead of very good.

Surviving success, building off it, will determine Tennessee’s fortunes in 2016, Jones said.

“How do you handle success?” he told reporters after the convincing Outback Bowl victory over Northwestern. “… We can’t forget the blueprint of what got us to this point. Our habits, our style of play, all the things that are important to playing winning football.”

Jones repeated the message to fans a month later, according to 247Sports.

“We’re not gonna hide from these expectations,” Jones said during a stop of a statewide tour. “This is what we expect, and this is what we work for. We’re Tennessee.”

Tennessee’s best players are welcoming the challenge.

As impressive as Outback Bowl MVP Jalen Hurd was in running through and around Northwestern, his postgame performance was even better.

The calendar had already flipped to 2016, and so had Hurd’s mindset.

Without prompting, Hurd said he expected to back in Tampa in January 2017, site of the national championship game.

He talked about how the previous summer’s workouts motivated him to keep churning against Northwestern’s physical defense, and how, now that the Vols have tasted success and fourth-quarter failure, how both will fuel an even more demanding offseason this summer.

It wasn’t quite Tim Tebow delivering the Promise, but the message was the same.

Tennessee has everything in place to win the East in 2016, and the Vols aren’t shying away from it.

“I will tell you this,” Jones told 247Sports. “There is a different spirit, a different mentality, a different mindset in the Anderson Training Center right now. This football team is very determined, and they’re very focused.”

There is a sense of urgency as well. This group won’t have this opportunity again.

Hurd will be a junior and likely off to the NFL. Quarterback Joshua Dobbs will be a senior. Rising junior defensive end Derek Barnett likely will soar toward the top of NFL Draft boards. The rising seniors who returned — most notably Cameron Sutton and Jalen Reeves-Maybin — have one more shot.

“We have our own expectations for ourselves,” Dobbs told ESPN.com. “We hear the outside stuff – you can’t miss it – but we have to focus on just doing our jobs and coming out ready to play in September.”