Tennessee football: Five takeaways from Vols’ 60-14 win vs. South Alabama Jaguars

3. The pass defense struggled.

You have to nitpick when a team plays a lower-level foe, especially one that’s mediocre by Group of Five standards. If Tennessee football had one issue, it was defending the pass, and this wasn’t something that came late in the game. There’s a reason South Alabama had a score in the first half to begin with.

The Vols allowed backup quarterback Desmond Trotter to throw all over them. He didn’t torch them on the ground the way previous mobile quarterbacks had, but he completed 19-of-32 passes for 216 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions.

Jalen Tolbert is already a national star, and he lived up to that hype in this game with seven catches for 143 yards and a touchdown. In Tolbert’s touchdown grab, he just had a catch on a simple crossing route and outran the entire Vols’ secondary for a score, which has to be a concern for the program going forward.

South Alabama was horrendous on third downs, going 1-of-16, but they did go 5-of-8 on fourth down attempts, and while some of those were trick running plays, it was also due to issues with the pass defense. Although the secondary can stop the run and make big plays, this is a concern, and Tim Banks has to address it.