That's just the problem. This was a scrimmage team, and we could manage only a field goal in the first quarter, only 10 points in the first half...a mediocre FCS team scored more on that bunch IN THEIR STADIUM than we scored on them today in our place. That's embarrassing. This is the worst Tennessee offense I can ever recall.
Wow. Battered Vol syndrome in full effect for sure. Sigh.
Okay. Remember your post below that criticized some of the Vol callers for reading too much into the ETSU game? You are doing the same thing on this game only from the other side. You are overemphasizing the importance of the final score, as if Tennessee ever actually felt threatened by UTEP. Believe me they did not.
Worst Tennessee offense you can every recall? Really? We averaged 6.9 yards per carry on the ground. They basically couldn't stop us. Run game so effective that - subtracting a kneel down and two sacks - we ran the ball a whopping 47 times and only bothered to throw 19 times, 16 of them by Guarantono.
They didn't stop us, we stopped ourselves with stupid penalties and a TO inside the one. Take away that TO and a few key penalties and we score 2 or 3 more TDs.
And here's the deal...penalties are correctable.. We didn't have too many the first two games.
I'm not saying there isn't anything to be concerned about. It's disgraceful that we gave up two sacks to UTEP (though I think one of those is on JG for holding the ball too long). I attribute the low score to lack of focus and intensity, which in itself could be a big problem going forward. Then again - it was UTEP. Our players should not have acted like all they had to do was show up, but actually that was pretty much true.
The stupid penalties are concerning. OL play was again atrocious at times, and our RBs made a lot of those yards on their own. And again, no excuse for giving up a sack. Calloway played very badly on PRs for the most part. Their WRs were open many times but their QB seems to throw worse than me, and that's really not much of an exaggeration.
Backing up to my original point, I think we easily could have scored 3 more TDs today without some obvious and easily correctable mistakes, and a good deal more motivation. It certainly wasn't lack of talent as no matter how many of you think our talent is beaten down, we exceed UTEPs talent by an extremely large margin.
If you shouldn't read too much into last weeks' 59 points, you shouldn't read too much into this week's 24 points. You can't have it both ways.