Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols in loss to Georgia State

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - AUGUST 31: J.T. Shrout #12 of the Tennessee Volunteers warms up before facing the Georgia State Panthers during the season opener at Neyland Stadium on August 31, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - AUGUST 31: J.T. Shrout #12 of the Tennessee Volunteers warms up before facing the Georgia State Panthers during the season opener at Neyland Stadium on August 31, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images
Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images /

There weren’t many positives in Tennessee football’s loss to the Georgia State Panthers. Here are our grades for the UT Volunteers against GSU.

Should everything be an F? After all, Tennessee football lost to a Sun Belt team that went 2-10 last year to open Jeremy Pruitt’s second season on the job. It could be a long year for the Vols in 2019 if this keeps up.

We can’t find too many positives from this game, but we can definitely break down which units were worse than others. And hey, maybe there were some groups that provided enough positives to give UT fans some encouragement for the future.

Okay, any of that will be spin in a major fashion. But Tennessee football wasn’t bad across the board, even if they did lose 38-30 and were trailing 38-23 up until there were two seconds left on the clock.

So it’s time to begin our breakdown of the Vols and how they performed in the first game of the season. In a general sense, it’s clearly not a passing grade. But we need to analyze who failed worse than whom.

As usual, we will be doling out the grades for all of the units on the offensive, defensive and special teams sides of the ball. And we’ll close with how the play-calling and overall coaching was in the game.

All of this matters, and the best UT fans can hope for is that it won’t be indicative of a larger issue throughout the season. If it is, they have numerous problems that run way deeper than anybody could have thought.

But maybe the best analogy could be the student who failed a test that one time that gave them one bad report card but they ended up with a very good final average. Hey, it’s always possible. Still, we have to dole out the official grades. So let’s get started. This is our report card for the Vols units in Tennessee football’s loss to the Georgia State Panthers.