Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols in their loss to WVU

Coaching

Offensive play-calling: C

Tyson Helton should have put Jarrett Guarantano in shotgun more and had him throw vertical passes to his playmakers like Marquez Callaway, Josh Palmer and Jauan Jennings. Tennessee football’s unit was not ready to establish the power rushing attack because of the issues on the offensive line. The screens and horizontal plays also got nothing as a result. So the best move would have been to rely on the receivers and tight ends more to move the ball down the field.

Defensive play-calling: B-

The unit did give up 40 points, but much of that had to do with poor execution. And there were two touchdown drives in which the right defense and the right execution was in place, but Will Grier and his receivers made a perfect play that nobody could defend. As a result, you can’t really hold the coaching too accountable on this side of the ball, but you can’t prop it up after 40 points and 547 yards.

Jeremy Pruitt’s head coaching grade: C+

Jeremy Pruitt gets a ton of credit for that fourth down call in the first half that got his team a touchdown. On top of that, he had numerous personnel issues that were going to limit what he could do in this game to begin with. So you can’t all-out slam what he was doing given the fact that he is installing new systems on both sides of the ball.

However, Pruitt accepted criticism on himself after the game based on how the players played. And it’s clear that the Vols were not all the way there mentally in some moments. As a result, there’s no way you can give him a good grade in his first outing after losing 40-14 with so much talent. There were some mental lapses by the team, including six penalties, and all the changing around of players messed them up for the game. So he has to get a C for this specific outing.

But let’s be clear, this is not an indictment of his coaching abilities. We just have to base this on what happened Saturday. It was Pruitt’s first game, and how he gets his team to rebound from this matters much more. You had to figure there would be growing pains with multiple new systems, so I’m giving him a break after this first one.