Tennessee football: Five takeaways from Vols 24-20 win at Missouri

3. Vols exploited Missouri’s proneness to penalties.

We said going into the game that the Missouri Tigers had issues with penalties. Jim Chaney and Jeremy Pruitt realized that, and they did a superb job making sure they exploited that in every way. How did they exploit it? They consistently went to the air to draw pass interference penalties and move the ball all night.

Mizzou finished with seven penalties for 70 yards. Now, Tennessee football only had seven penalties for 60 yards. But anybody who watched the game knows that the Tigers’ penalties were far more costly. And those costly penalties were particularly with the Vols on offense, which is why this game went the way it did.

Each of the drives in which Jarrett Guarantano had a touchdown pass had a pass interference penalty on them. There was another one in which the Tigers had two pass interference penalties, and although the Vols punted on the drive, they did it from midfield, flipping the field position battle from where it was. So their offense benefitted from lots of Mizzou mistakes.

Also, late in the third, with the ball and the game tied, Mizzou had a chance to take back control. But they had an incidental facemask on offense that killed a drive. Simply put, they had critical penalty after critical penalty. Pruitt and Chaney knew this would be a thing, and even Derrick Ansley exploited it at one point. That was a huge reason for the outcome of this game.