Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols at South Carolina

Tennessee football’s close loss to the South Carolina Gamecocks had lots of issues. Here are the Volunteers’ grades from the game in Columbia.

Losing on the road by a field goal when you had a two-score lead in the second half can be heartbreaking. Falling to 3-5 in the process and 1-4 in the SEC makes it worse. But Tennessee football was an eight and a half point underdog Saturday night to the South Carolina Gamecocks.

As a result, it’s pretty clear that the Vols had some positive things go their way. You could pretty much judge this game straight up, in fact, and not based on who they were playing considering the state of both programs.

Tennessee football’s units almost all produced mixed results. Some did everything right to win the game, while others sometimes made the right plays. There were a few, however, who were just awful the whole game and should be called out.

Our report card for the Vols in their close loss in Columbia brings mixed results all the way around. However, because of the mixed results from some groups we talked about, it was a bit harder than usual to exactly break down how everybody played.

Some of the groups that made the key plays to spot Rocky Top an early lead were also responsible for their team’s demise. And it certainly made this week’s report card a lot more difficult than those of previous games. The final series for both sides of the ball were huge parts of making this a tricky situation.

However, it was clear which units performed better than others. And some of this analysis was actually pretty easy to break down. So we’re going to do it here. This is our Tennessee football report card following the Vols field goal loss to the South Carolina Gamecocks.