Tennessee football report card in 44-21 loss at Georgia

Here are the Tennessee football Volunteers’ grades in their loss to the Bulldogs.

For the first time all year, Tennessee football played a ranked team, and naturally, it’s level of play appeared to reduce dramatically. Increased competition is obviously going to affect how your team looks, and that was certainly the case for the Vols on Saturday.

Some perceived strengths of Rocky Top came up massively short, but a couple of the perceived weaknesses finally emerged at times as well. It was a wild game, and while the No. 3 ranked Georgia Bulldogs outplayed UT significantly in its 44-21 win, gaining over 200 yards more offensively, the Vols certainly had a chance to make this a game.

All Tennessee football had to do was keep an advantage over Georgia in the mistakes game. That didn’t happen. By the mid-point of the third quarter, the Vols had surpassed UGA in mistakes, and UGA had already looked like the better team. It was luck that the game wasn’t a blowout then.

A couple of units were responsible for those mistakes and not keeping the Vols in the game. In this post, as we get set to break down the grades for all the different position groups on Rocky Top in that loss, we’re going to take those mistakes into account.

It’s one thing to lose and get outplayed by a team that is matched up better than you at different points. That had a lot to do with what happened on Saturday, and we’ll point that out. But when you are outmatched, obvious mistakes make your path harder, and that’s what happened Saturday. We’ll have to call those units out.

As usual, we will separate our grades by offense, defense special teams and coaching, and we will grade each position group in those units. Looking back on that second-half collapse, here is Tennessee football’s report card in its loss at the Georgia Bulldogs.