Subscribe
Follow Us
Well then! Tennessee football has officially been eliminated from College Football Playoff contention after a 63-31 drubbing at the hands of South Carolina. That's not even mentioning the long-term ramifications of this loss, after Hendon Hooker was announced to have torn his ACL, potentially leaving Tennessee vulnerable next week against a Vanderbilt team playing for bowl eligibility at home.
It was a complete collapse of a Vols team that at one point looked like real contenders for not just the SEC East, but a National Championship.
What caused this? That's why you've come here, for me to give you the answers! Let's take a dive into what went wrong and who's to blame for Tennessee's heartbreaking loss to South Carolina.
2. The Entire Defense
There's no way to spin this in a positive light. When an offense has 11 drives, and scores a touchdown on nine of them, you're not going to win a whole lot of football games. The offensive capabilities of your team don't matter when you're giving up a touchdown 81% of the time on defense.
Absolutely zero sustainability in that. None at all. You could stick Joe Burrow and the 2019 LSU offense out there, you give up nine touchdowns out of 11 drives, you are not going to survive. The Tennessee football defense, despite being much maligned for much of the season, has put together some good performances. Giving up just six points against Kentucky was the high point for sure, but this is the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Spencer Rattler has looked absolutely pedestrian for large portions of the 2022 season, and he looked like Patrick Mahomes out there against Tennessee. That's how bad it got. South Carolina ran out of fireworks. They ran out of fireworks!
1. Josh Heupel
Rumors floated all week that the reason linebacker Jeremy Banks didn't travel with the team was due to an altercation he got into with Hendon Hooker in the locker room. Whether those rumors are true or not, Josh Heupel didn't do a whole lot to fix the situation in the locker room. The details of the altercation, if it happened, don't matter much.
There was some kind of effect on the locker room surrounding Jeremy Banks, and Heupel was unable to quell the mixed emotions inside the team. That's asking for bad things to happen, and well, they sure did. Tennessee football couldn't get a whole lot going on offense for the first half, and even when they finally found a groove, the defense was still softer than 4-ply toilet paper and South Carolina cruised through them like they had a police escort.
We saw similar things happen at Ole Miss as Lane Kiffin failed to control the discontent in his locker room surrounding his future, and the Rebs got smacked by Arkansas. The same exact thing occurred to the Vols in Columbia on Saturday night.
Tennessee football has done a whole lot of improving in a very short time span under Josh Heupel. Truly, all the respect he's been shown this year has been earned, but there comes times in every coach's tenure when they have to sort out the emotions of the locker room. This time, Heupel wasn't successful. That's not to say he won't ever be able to do it, but we now know the ramifications if this happens again and Heupel is again unsuccessful.
