Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols in their win over Chattanooga

Finally, lots of units had decent grades in a Tennessee football game. Here is our breakdown of the Volunteers’ units in their 45-0 victory over the Mocs.

It’s hard to grade a team when they face an FCS opponent. But for everybody who knows anything about the way Tennessee football has looked through the first two weeks of the season, there are lots of things about the Vols that are worthy of analysis.

In fact, this game allows for more analysis than both because of how deep Jeremy Pruitt was able to go into the roster. The expectation was for him to be able to do that two weeks ago, but obviously, that wasn’t the case.

A 38-30 loss to the Georgia State Panthers followed by a heartbreaking overtime loss to the BYU Cougars was enough for Tennessee football to be thrilled with a dominating 45-0 victory over the Chattanooga Mocs. And yes, they were thrilled.

As we get set to dish out our grades for each unit from the game, we’re very aware of the fact that they are hard to judge because of whom they played. However, our take is that Georgia State, while better, can’t be that much better to the point that we’re unable to measure improvement.

So we’ll be giving out these grades somewhat within the context of the season, which may be a bit shocking to some people. But that’s the best way for us to properly gauge what actually happened in the game that got Pruitt’s second team its first win of the year.

Going forward, we have no way of knowing if this improvement will serve as a benefit against the Florida Gators. So that will be something worth finding out. But it was a good start for Rocky Top to hit the reset button three weeks into the season.

How was that reset button hit? Which groups helped it happen? That’s what these grades are all about. Here is our report card for Tennessee football following the Vols’ 45-0 win over the Chattanooga Mocs.