Tennessee Football Report Card: Grading the Vols vs Appalachian State

Coaching: F

Butch Jones deserves credit for keeping his players from panicking. Bob Shoop did a decent job as defensive coordinator really only holding the Appalachian State Mountaineers to one score.

However, Jones still struggled all night to get his team more energetic. And Shoop got outsmarted on too many misdirection plays.

On top of both of those things, Mike DeBord deserves a big fat F for his playcalling. Against a team with a loaded and complex 3-4 defense, he failed to take advantage of Appalachian State’s one weakness: the secondary.

This unit was awful and only helped by the front seven. The only time he elected to take a shot against that group, it resulted in a touchdown pass. Why did he fail to do that more often?

These questions are why the coaching gets such a failure performance. Jones also blew all three timeouts in the first half.

However, like we said, Jones and Shoop made questionable decisions all night. The real blame for this epic collapse was DeBord. He was so beyond predictable on his running plays and out routes that the Vols should have had three more turnovers.

When you put it altogether, even the nice things Jones and Shoop did can’t get this overall grade from being an F. The whole staff failed miserably to have this team ready to play, and it almost cost them.

That could have been the first step to costing Jones his job to. As it is, he survived to keep all the goals of this program alive.

But the pressure is even greater than it was before.