Tennessee football Smokey Points: Top five Vols performers in Georgia State loss

Despite being embarrassed by the Georgia State Panthers, some Tennessee football players stood out. Here are the best UT Volunteers performers vs. GSU.

You can’t overstate how bad a 38-30 loss to a Sun Belt team that went 2-10 last year is. Tennessee football was horrible in every aspect of the game, and there are very few positives to come out of the Vols’ loss.

However, not everybody is at fault for what happened. Plenty of players on Rocky Top did their part, even if they did not have help elsewhere. Football is the ultimate team sport, so some players can look superb in a hideous loss.

That was the case on Saturday. Quite a few Tennessee football players stepped up, many of whom showed dramatic improvement over last year, and it still couldn’t stop them from trailing 38-23 late in the fourth quarter.

So who are these players we may exonerate for what happened on Saturday? Well, that’s what we’re going to break down in this post. This will be an analysis of the guys who did come to play even as their teammates didn’t.

We have to return to our Smokey Points anyway, and it was easier than it usually is to find top performers from the Georgia State loss. Now, to be fair, that’s because against Georgia State, some people are bound to stand out.

But there are a couple of players on this list who would have made it for any game. They had expectations to take a step forward when the year started, and the first game of the season showed they did that, even if it was a humiliating loss.

Now, to be fair, some of these players did have a few mistakes in Saturday’s game. But their good outweighed their bad, which was a rarity on the day. So let’s name who they are. These are the five Vols who earned Smokey Points in Tennessee football’s 38-30 loss to the Georgia State Panthers that opened the 2019 season.