Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols in their loss to Florida
Coaching
Offensive play-calling: C-
Tyson Helton can be excused for wanting to establish the run a bit. And you can’t put all the turnovers on him. But Tennessee football’s play-calling became far too predictable at times, and as a result, Florida was able to sell out to stop his offense.
It makes sense to want to establish the run and wear down your opposing defense. Helton did stick to that. But once you’re down by three and four scores because of mistakes, you have to abandon it. That’s especially true when you don’t have the line to do what you want to do. Helton needed to better-adapt his play-calling to his personnel, and he failed miserably there.
Defensive play-calling: B
Jeremy Pruitt called a pretty solid game defensively when you take everything into account. There were some miscues, but as we already stated, Tennessee football’s defense was not the main problem in Saturday’s loss. The Vols did what they could on that side of the ball before the onslaught came due to turnovers on the other side.
Many times, the play was called right, and you could notice a player getting out of position, such as a linebacker closing in on a quarterback when he should stay in coverage. Those issues have got to be fixed going forward, but the play-calling was fine.
Overall coaching grade: C-
Despite okay defensive play-calling, Pruitt and co. overall simply did not have their guys ready to play on Saturday. That was a horrible outing for the Vols, and many of the mistakes came down to coaching. The play-calling itself wasn’t a disaster, and that’s why the group gets a C-. But there are so many things they could have done better, and they have a lot to fix in the future.