Vols lose to Alabama for the 12th straight time
KNOXVILLE — Butch Jones could have started smoking his first-ever Alabama-Tennessee victory cigar midway through the first quarter Saturday.
Tennessee offered admirable resistance to top-ranked Alabama in the second quarter. By then, though, the Volunteers’ dreams of a monumental upset had been dashed.
The top-ranked Crimson Tide scored 21 points in the game’s first seven minutes on the way to a 58-21 Southeastern Conference victory over Tennessee in front of 97,087 fans at Neyland Stadium.
Alabama’s 12th straight victory in the rivalry series came with former Crimson Tide defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt growing frustrated on the Tennessee sideline with the effort of some players on his defense.
Meanwhile, the man Pruitt replaced as Tennessee’s head coach received a cooler bath on the sideline and left Neyland Stadium puffing a stogie. Jones, who coached Tennessee from 2013 to 2017, is now an offensive analyst for Alabama (8-0, 4-0).
The Crimson Tide make that an easy job.
Analysis: Tua Tagovailoa is really good.
Alabama’s sophomore quarterback tossed four touchdown passes, bringing his season total to 25 without an interception.
Tennessee (3-4, 1-3) countered with a second-quarter rally behind backup quarterback Keller Chryst, cutting the deficit to 35-14. But a final
Tide score before halftime on a 9-yard Tagovailoa pass to Irv Smith Jr. gave Alabama a comfortable 42-14 cushion entering the break.
“Going into it, we knew we would have to play a perfect game in order to have a chance to beat them,” Pruitt said. “But I wanted to see our guys compete and play hard and keep improving. There’s a lot of guys on our team that did. The unfortunate part is that if you’ve got some guys that don’t, it don’t really show up during the game.”
Pruitt said “this game was way too big” for some of Tennessee’s players. He suggested to sideline reporters at halftime that the recruiting process will be the Vols’ only hope to compete with a program of Alabama’s stature.
The discrepancies in talent and mentality that Pruitt pointed out with his team Saturday could have been interpreted as veiled shots at Jones for what he left behind after five seasons in Knoxville.
“We’ve got guys in our program that in 10 months they’ve really changed the way they think,” Pruitt said. “They’ve changed the way they go about their business every single day. They’ve worked hard. They’ve tried to do exactly what we want them to do. But I don’t think it takes much to look, if you look at their sideline and you look at our sideline, it don’t hardly look the same.”
Alabama dominated all facets of the game early. Midway through the first quarter, Tennessee had minus24 yards. Alabama had a 12-0 advantage in first downs before an offside penalty gifted the Vols a first down.
When Neyland Stadium’s public-address announcer bellowed the news of “First down, Tennessee,” fans responded with cheers that reeked of cynicism.
The good news for Tennessee is that it ended a stretch of three consecutive games against preseason top-10 opponents. The Vols managed a victory at Auburn last week that put a bowl game within reach.
Tennessee plays at South Carolina (3-3, 2-3) this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. It’s the first of a five-game stretch against manageable opponents.
“The guys that are doing the right thing every day, we’ve got to overcompensate for the guys that are not doing the right thing every day,” said senior defensive end Kyle Phillips, who scored Tennessee’s lone touchdown of the second half when he intercepted a tipped Jalen Hurts pass and ran it back 27 yards for a touchdown. “I think we can win out, and that’s what we plan on doing. So we’ve just got to keep working each and every day and we’ll get the result that we’re looking for. And we can still end up with a good season.”
But on Saturday, the progress made by the Vols this season looked temporarily lost in the smoky haze Jones created.
“It takes more than seven on defense and five on offense,” Pruitt said. “It takes 11 guys. You might have guys trying to do it the right way, but maybe they don’t execute — or maybe today, that wasn’t good enough.”
Contact David Cobb at dcobb@ timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DavidWCobb and on Facebook at facebook.com/volsupdate.