Tennessee football report card: Grading the Vols in 17-13 Kentucky win

Resiliency gets an A+ for Tennessee football in their victory over the Kentucky Wildcats. Here are the grades for all of the Volunteers units.

It’s hard to critique this one. Tennessee football overcame so much to beat just a 4-5 team on the road and get to .500 themselves that Vols fans will not stop celebrating over the next two weeks since they have a bye week Saturday.

However, if Jeremy Pruitt doesn’t spend time critiquing the units, then they could be in trouble coming off of the bye. After all, at 5-5, these guys haven’t made a bowl game yet. They still have to either beat the Missouri Tigers on the road or the Vanderbilt Commodores at home. And they should be shooting to beat both anyway to get to 7-5.

Anyway, Tennessee football has numerous different units and players who deserve a ton of credit for this road win over Kentucky. There is no way to ignore just how great of a win this was for Jeremy Pruitt’s team in Lexington.

As we get set to dish out the grades for the game, though, there were certainly some units worthy of criticism. And we’ll make sure to call them out where we have to, as we can’t just say everything was perfect for Rocky Top in this game.

In fact, a few subpar performances nearly kept this team from winning a game it should have won. But superb performances by other units allowed them to hold firm and get to 5-5 in a dramatic turnaround after their 0-2 start with two losses to Power Five programs.

As usual, we’re going to separate the units into offense, defense, special teams and coaching and grade the different positions groups on each one before grading each unit as a whole. And some units and players certainly stand out above others.

But who are those position groups? Which ones struggled? Let’s break all of that down here. This is our report card for Tennessee football coming off the Vols’ 17-13 win over the Kentucky Wildcats in Lexington.