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Tennessee football: Vols could be five mistakes away from 4-0

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - AUGUST 31: Jarrett Guarantano #2 of Tennessee Volunteers throws a pass against Georgia State Panthers during the first quarter of the season opener at Neyland Stadium on August 31, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - AUGUST 31: Jarrett Guarantano #2 of Tennessee Volunteers throws a pass against Georgia State Panthers during the first quarter of the season opener at Neyland Stadium on August 31, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images) /
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Despite how bad they have looked in their 1-3 start, Tennessee football is close to doing the opposite. The Volunteers could actually be undefeated.

It’s crazy to think about given how bad the season started. But the key factor to Tennessee football beginning Jeremy Pruitt’s second year 1-3 is mistakes. The Vols have made far too many of them, and just changing five of them could change how things have gone.

Yes, we’re not kidding. UT is just a handful of mistakes away from being undefeated, and if they didn’t make any of these basic mistakes, they would be undefeated and rolling while Pruitt looks like a genius.

That shows you just how close things are to going one way or the other. It also shows that Pruitt, Jim Chaney and Derrick Ansley have called the right plays. They just aren’t getting the right execution, and that’s a big deal.

We’ve analyzed 14 critical mistakes that Tennessee football has made this year, and these were blatant mistakes due to lack of execution. If they fix all of them, then they win their first three games by three scores or more each and then score a very solid victory over the Florida Gators.

However, that’s a ton of mistakes, and if you just want to look at what you need to make them 4-0, you can pick the right combination of five of those mistakes to get there. In this post, we’re going to focus on that. With five mistakes needing to be altered, we will have five pages and will dedicate each page to the mistakes people can choose from, with some standing on their own.

The mark of a team being close to having dramatically better outcome on a season is the combination of how many mistakes they made and how few mistakes they needed to turn things around. That gap is actually the biggest difference.

In the Vols case, a gap of 14 mistakes with only five needed to reverse things shows just how close they have been. To be fair, it may show just how close they are to turning things around if they are able to get more time to develop.

At this point, Pruitt deserves that. And it explains why he does believe his team is 100 times better than last year. So how close are the Vols to where they need to be? What could they have done differently? Here is a look at how Tennessee football could be undefeated right now.

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