The days after: arkansas
by: Bob Baskervillethe sum of all fears…
3 MOMENTS THAT SEALED TENNESSEE’S FATE IN ARKANSAS
We talked about it for two weeks...
After winning a game in a very different, un-Heupel-like fashion in Oklahoma, we all felt it was time to print Tennessee’s College Football Playoff tickets. Even if we lost to Alabama AND Georgia, a 10-2 record feels like it’s good enough to get the Vols past the CFP’s velvet rope.
Arkansas would be the Vols next opponent, and we felt that even with a “B” effort, there’s enough talent on both sides of the ball for Tennessee to not only win in Fayetteville, but win comfortably. After all, Arkansas was 3-2, and had squandered leads which resulted in losses to
Oklahoma St. and Texas A&M, and struggled to beat a really bad UAB team. Arkansas was erratic at the all-important Quarterback position in Taylon Green, who Hog Coach Sam Pittman admitted earlier in the week, “has a confidence issue”. The Razorbacks have a legit running game on offence, but worlds would collide this weekend, with Tennessee’s stout Front Four. We weren’t worried.
Hell, even our guest on Under Review earlier in the week, who covers the Razorbacks for Rivals, said he “doesn’t see a way where Arkansas wins this game”. We felt this was the breakout game for Nico Iamaleava that we’ve been waiting for. In short, it felt like it was all coming together for the Big Orange...ranked 4th in the country, and continuing to climb. Arkansas was simply the next rung in the ladder.
But College Football’s a funny game...now more than ever! It started early on Saturday, when Texas A&M laid waste to #9 Missouri. We’ve all been skeptical of Mizzou as a Top 10 team; well now we knew. Playoff favorite? How about enjoy the Citrus Bowl Coach Drink! Just another moment of separation for the Vols in their journey to the field of 12. Then Alabama was getting run by Vanderbilt. You read that right...VANDERBILT! Candy brought the fight for 60 minutes and pulled off the unthinkable...taking down the #1 team in the nation...enough to likely make Monday’s Paul Finebaum Show the most watched televised therapy session in history.
In a week that was supposed to be lackluster in terms of quality matchups, we saw chaos early. Little did we know that the chaos was only beginning.
There were a few folks out there that said, beware of the Hogs...Tennessee’s track record in Fayetteville has been pretty abysmal, and we’ve seen a pattern where Josh Heupel teams typically have at least one totally inexplicably bad performance on the road each season. But instead, we harped on how well Josh’s teams perform coming off a bye week. In short, we didn’t listen to the naysayers, and didn’t recognize that more than ever, on any given Saturday, just about anything can happen.
Boy, did “anything” happen in Fayetteville! The Vols came in with a gameplan, but so did Arkansas. Win the time of possession game, and on defense, throw something at Tennessee that they didn’t expect to see, this time a 3-2-6 stack. We all know how that went, as evidenced by the 3-0 halftime score. Arkansas man-handled Tennessee at every turn, and frankly, it was a gift that the Hogs didn’t have a much larger lead in the first half. Credit to the Vols defense for helping keep this thing close in the first half. Tennessee then tried to adjust to Arkansas’ defensive curveball and countered with some pretty efficient drives to kick off the second half to jump to a 14-3 lead...at that point, the Vols had chances to choke Arkansas out...but they didn’t. They also didn’t really ever fully adjust on offense to Arkansas’ change of pace defense...which made our guy Nico look overwhelmed many times. Can’t believe I’m saying it, but Nico looked less confident than Taylon Green, you know...the guy who was supposedly lacking confidence! Green balled out before getting an injury that would prevent him from finishing the game, but by the time he was forced to leave, he had done his job...he had put Arkansas in a position to win the game, and that guy with “the confidence problem”, had instilled enough confidence throughout his team for them to firmly believe they could do something great. And we know how it went from there. In short, we should have listened, particularly after the way the day started in College Football!
To me, there’s a long list of things that went wrong in Fayetteville, but there were three that truly underscored what was a collapse the likes of which I can’t recall seeing in a long, long time around here...not even during the darkest moments in the Dooley/Jones/Pruitt regimes...and they all happened after Tennessee went up 14-3 and seemingly was seizing control of the game. Seemingly.
1) The roughing the kicker penalty by Jordan Ross on the Arkansas punt after we had jumped out in front, felt unforgivable. What was supposed to be a change in possession led to an Arkansas FG...points in a game that didn’t have many.
2) With a little over 4 minutes left in the game, Squirrel White opts to not catch a punt, and lets it roll twenty yards back to the Tennessee 21. Tennessee goes three and out, only uses :45 seconds of time on the clock, and then punts back to Arkansas, letting them start at their own 41. It would lead to the Razorbacks scoring the go-ahead touchdown.
3) And then of course, the last drive by Tennessee, and the clock management malpractice that occurred there, most notably after Nico did his best Patrick Mahomes impersonation with an on the run, 42 yard strike to Donte Thornton. But then? Tick, tick, tick, and by the time #8 starts the next play and fails to complete a pass to Miles Kitselman, there was only :17 seconds remaining in the game. All told, from play two of that drive, which was a Nico run, then the pass to Thornton, then the incomplete to Kitselman, there was :52 seconds of time burned...and the team had 2 timeouts that they didn’t use. Not just out of character for the go-go Vols offense, it was incomprehensible to see what was happening.
Now, you can say Nico “pulled a Milton” by running out of bounds on the last play of the game, which cost us a possible win, but to me, the Vols lost the game much, much earlier than that. This was a failure of epic proportions on the field, and on the sidelines. The hope now is that the Vols use this as a “never forget” moment and try to re-tool for the last seven games of the season. We saw it on Saturday, where 5 of the nation’s top 11 teams lost to decided underdogs, and Miami could have made it six had they not pulled a last minute rabbit out of their hat against Cal. On what appeared to be the most predictable weekend so far in College Football, the most unpredictable happened...and in multiple locations around the country. So with that, this season is not lost for Tennessee...far from it. But without a doubt, the debacle in Fayetteville will show us what the character of this team and coaching staff really is as they try to erase the first stumble in their climb. Can they get their footing back? We’ll see soon enough Saturday night in Neyland.
