Tennessee football report card in 31-19 Florida loss

Here are the Tennessee football Volunteers’ grades against the Gators.

Unlike most of their losses this year, Tennessee football didn’t leave much to celebrate in its 31-19 loss to the Florida Gators on Saturday. Dishing out grades will actually be much more difficult than usual as a result, even for the units that had players perform well in certain aspects of the game throughout the day.

Everybody was at fault in the Vols’ sixth straight double-digit loss on the year to fall to 4-6, and their fourth straight loss in the series to Florida. Even groups that made plays in certain ways managed to make critical mistakes at the same time. That made for very few good grades for us to give out, something that’s different from how we usually do this.

As we get set to give out our report card for this game, we’re weighting what units did when the game was within reach. Garbage time performances count much less, and Tennessee football had lots of those in this one. Just like always, we’ll have two slides for offense and then one slide for defense, special teams and coaching. These are our grades for the Vols.

Offensive grades part I

Quarterbacks: C-

J.T. Shrout looked great on the final two drives, completing 12-of-14 passes for 121 yards, one touchdown and no interception. However, that was garbage time. Harrison Bailey did the bulk of the work, and he missed a lot of easy throws, going 14-of-21 for 111 yards and one touchdown. Still, neither threw an interception, and they were both backups before this week.

Running backs: C+

Eric Gray and Ty Chandler combined for 157 yards and two touchdowns. Like they usually do, they carried Tennessee football’s offense. However, they only averaged four yards a carry combined on the ground against an average Florida rush defense. Meanwhile, Gray missed blocks on three key plays that allowed sacks, significantly decreasing the value of this position.