Looking at the national statistical rankings after Week 3, Tennessee’s rushing offense appears to be improving, while its passing offense appears extraordinarily safe but also largely ineffective, comparatively speaking.
Meanwhile, the defense’s numbers look promising heading into SEC play, and the team’s turnovers and penalties rankings took a major hit this week.
Offense
The Vols’ passing game is interesting. On one hand, you can’t get any better than No. 1 at not throwing interceptions. And completion percentage and team passing efficiency make you think that something is going well for the passing attack. On the other hand, though, the actual number of passing yards is ranked woefully low.
The competition certainly has something to do with these numbers (and all of the rest of them in this post as well), but there is some promise there.
Defense
If you’re going to point to ETSU and UTEP being responsible for some of these promising numbers, you also need to acknowledge that West Virginia is on the resume, too. The numbers looked bad after that first week, but now that most teams are beginning to add real opponents to their schedules, things are beginning to even out. So yeah, ETSU and UTEP, but with the Mountaineers on there, too, having a Top 15 defense after Week 3 is a happy thing. The team is also Top 20 in Scoring Defense and First Downs Defense.
If they can start to generate some pressure behind the line of scrimmage in the form of sacks and TFLs without breaking the stuff they’re doing well, the team could be good on defense. Even if the SEC schedule does some damage to that concept, at the very least it seems like a positive development to have those numbers at this point of the season.
Special Teams
Turnovers and Penalties
This right here shows the reason for the difference in the ETSU and UTEP outcomes, as there was a major negative change in both penalties and turnovers. I’ve been thinking (and saying) that that has been uncharacteristic of the team this year, but looking back to the numbers right after the West Virginia game, that may not be the case.
It is really going to be interesting to see how these stats play out over the next 4-5 games… it will be a good measure on improvement versus 2017 (in spite of W-L record). Thanks for putting it together. Go Vols!