Tennessee was one quarter off of having a perfect bounce-back game

Tennessee cruised by UTSA 45-14 today in what, in hindsight, was an easy win. The box score also suggests that the Vols had their way with the visitors, which was largely true, but if you were in the stadium, you probably experienced at least a couple of tense moments.

If all you know about Tennessee’s win are the final stats, then on paper it looks like the sort of blowout you’d expect. Tennessee out-gained the Roadrunners 512-319 yards and piled up 303 yards on the ground.

The Vols took a 31-0 lead into the halftime locker room and it looked like the bench would be cleared early in the second half.

It didn’t work out that way, and how the third quarter unfurled is going to leave a sour taste in the mouths of many fans in the wake of this win, despite the final score. In a perfect world maybe fans wouldn’t grumble after a 31 point win, but we all know how this works.

The short story is that UTSA, after a halftime quarterback change, scored touchdowns on their first two possessions of the second half with a Tennessee three and out wedged in between there.

The result was that a 31 point game at halftime suddenly had the potential for drama after the Roadrunners cut it to 31-14 with 5:16 left in the third quarter and the Vols’ offense suddenly stagnant.

“Obviously, in the third quarter, end of the second quarter, there’s some things that we didn’t operate as efficiently as we needed to,” Josh Heupel said of the lull.

“Got to be better than that as we continue to go. But again, finish strong. Love the effort.”

Tennessee did finish strong, putting the clamps on the Roadrunner’s offense while Joe Milton and the offense got back on track with consecutive touchdown drives to make the final margin 45-14.

The third quarter, though was just a head-scratcher. After each team had two possessions UTSA had out-gained Tennessee 145 yards to 19, which no one would have predicted after the Vols piled up 359 yards of offense in the first half compared to just 98 for the Roadrunners.

Certainly part of the issue was a cooled off Milton. He had started hot, completing 14-of-16 passes for 156 yards in the first half to go with two touchdowns and a 79 yard TD run (the longest by a quarterback in program history).

However, towards the end of the first half and into the third quarter he went through a stretch where he completed just 1-of-12 throws with eight straight incompletions. Needless to say, that cold stretch contributed to the Vols’ offense bogging down.

Milton’s issues came out of nowhere as he had looked really sharp earlier in the game, hitting Ramel Keyton with a 48 yard touchdown and finding Kaleb Webb with an 18 yard strike for Webb’s first career touchdown in addition to his 79 yard scoring run on the first play of the game.

“A couple of them (incompletions) are on him. There’s a couple deep balls that were a little bit off,” Heupel said of Milton’s lull.

“Wide receivers being in the sync on some of their route patterns, too, in the middle of the field. So it’s a combination of all those things in the middle that didn’t let us operate as efficiently as we needed to.”

It came out of nowhere because the Vols started the game operating just about as efficiently as Heupel could have hoped.

The Vols scored touchdowns on four of their first five possessions of the game, and they did it with the tempo that we haven’t seen ton of this fall. The first four touchdown drives took 00:14, 2:56 00:26 and 1:17.

Tennessee averaged an eye-popping 9.7 yards per play in the first half while holding UTSA to just 2.5 yards per play. That’s pretty efficient on both sides of the ball.

Furthermore, after killing themselves with 10 penalties last week, Tennessee was flagged just once in the first half today.

From the tempo, to the penalties, to the offensive execution, to the focus to come out and play well from the jump against an overmatched opponent Tennessee was checking a lot of the boxes of areas that were concerns coming out of Gainesville.

If the game had just ended at halftime the story line would be that Tennessee had a nice bounce back after Florida and responded the right way before hosting South Carolina next week in what’s going to be an enormous game.

Instead, a portion of the fan base will dwell on the third quarter struggles and the part that Milton’s inaccuracy after a hot start contributed. It may just come down to whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty person.

Josh Heupel obviously would have liked to have seen his team play four solid quarters of football than three, but that third quarter aside the head coach likes the way that his team has responded after the Florida loss.

“You don’t want to have to learn them that way (after a loss). But I think we learned a lot about our football team in the second half of last week’s game, too. And, I say that, resilient, tough, competitive, willing to go out and compete,” Heupel.

“They did that today too. They had a really good week of practice. I came back, you could tell it hurt and (the players) came back to practice well too. So this group has been pretty consistent in that. I expect that.”

Even if Tennessee had won this one 70-0 many fans would have mostly dismissed it as meaningless, already turning their focus to South Carolina.

That’s understandable, but third quarter aside (I know, it’s hard to unsee). Tennessee did some good things today, but with the SEC grind now upon them, another third quarter like they had today will absolutely get them beat in the weeks ahead.

Given the expectations entering this season coupled with the loss at Florida, next week’s match-up against the Gamecock’s could very well be the biggest contest of Heupel’s young tenure in Knoxville.

He’ll need to get four quarters out of his football team next Saturday.

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