7. Creating turnovers
This was foreshadowed in the game against the UTEP Miners. The Vols won that one 24-0, but Jeremy Pruitt was very angry after the game and insisted that the team needed to do a better job of taking care of the ball.
After committing six turnovers against the Florida Gators a week later, the problem of not creating turnovers manifested in an ugly way against the Georgia Bulldogs. In that game, Tennessee football forced four fumbles.
Darrell Taylor forced three fumbles and had three sacks by himself. However, none of those turnovers were recovered. And Georgia’s first fumble of the game was recovered and run in for a touchdown to give them a 7-0 lead.
These problems continued throughout the year. They only forced 15 turnovers on the season. That put them outside of the Top 100. Sure, they were in the Top 30 in fewest turnovers with 16, but that puts their turnover margin at minus-one, good for No. 77 in the nation.
On top of that, when you’re not a great team and have a brutal SEC schedule, you need to win turnover battles to have any chance to win games. So this was doubly brutal, and it’s why the Vols only went 5-7 this season while getting blown out in six of their seven games.
If Pruitt truly is going to build his team via an opportunistic defense in the future, he knows as well as anybody that they’re going to have to force more turnovers. That’s the nature of his teams, so what happened this year had to be completely unacceptable by his standards.