Tennessee football Smokey Points: Top 5 Vols performers vs. Alabama

Tennessee football’s loss to the Crimson Tide didn’t come without some solid players. Here are the five Volunteers who earned helmet stickers against Bama.

Well, it was honestly what anybody would have expected. The Alabama Crimson Tide did to Tennessee football what they did to everybody this year and made the Vols look silly, and they did it with an offensive onslaught.

This isn’t surprising, really. On so many plays that the Tide made, specifically in the passing game from Tua Tagovailoa, the Vols had almost the perfect defense. There was simply no way to defend what Tagovailoa was able to do.

Jeremy Pruitt calling out his players may have been necessary, and it’s worth it to have such a high standard. But Tennessee football just didn’t have the horses good enough to compete with maybe the best team of all time.

Still, there were surprisingly some very good moments on Rocky Top. In fact, even in a blowout 58-21 loss, you could look at a few players who stood out with very impressive performances and deserve some respect. That’s what we’re going to do here.

Unlike their game against the Auburn Tigers, the Vols don’t have five clear-cut guys worthy of Smokey Points. We did have to stretch again in this one a bit, whereas there were 15 guys last week we could have named.

However, a few guys blatantly deserved some love with their performances, and it’s still worth giving them helmet stickers. You’ll notice that some of the guys we name racked up key stats, others simply played hard on a consistent basis, and one guy surprised us by filling a role.

All of these guys deserve a mention, so we’re going to do that here, even in a really bad loss. These are our helmet stickers for the five best Vols performers in Tennessee football’s 58-21 loss at home to the Alabama Crimson Tide.