Tennessee made the third-biggest move of the week in S&P+, up a dozen spots from 82nd to 70th overall (shout out to Minnesota’s 41-10 beat down of Purdue, leaping 23 spots). The bad news: Missouri is a Top 25 team in S&P+. The Tigers actually fell three spots after a narrow victory over Vanderbilt, but are 23rd in the S&P+ rankings and would be favored by about a touchdown on the Vols. The good news: Vanderbilt is now the worst team in the league by the same metric.
Jarrett Guarantano in national rankings (via Sports Source Analytics): 27th in completion percentage, 24th in yards per attempt, and one of only eight quarterbacks with 200+ passing attempts and two or fewer interceptions. They showed this on the Jumbotron yesterday and I didn’t believe it, but it’s true (via Sports Reference): Guarantano’s career completion percentage of 63.8% is currently the best in school history. Daryl Dickey completed 63% of his passes, Peyton Manning 62.5%. Guarantano is at 65.1% in 2018; no Vol quarterback has hit that mark since Erik Ainge in 2006 (67%).
Things we’re still bad at: the Vols are 126th nationally in tackles for loss allowed, surrendering 8.3 per game. This is still a worse pace than last year (7.42 per game), but also still an improvement in terms of how far we’re going backward. Last year the Vols lost an average of 4.1 yards per TFL. This year it’s only an average of three yards lost. More runs for -1, fewer total disasters, etc.
Tennessee continues to be far more explosive this season. Last year the Vols had 38 plays of 20+ yards and 18 plays of 30+ yards. This year, through ten games: 45 plays of 20+ yards, 24 plays of 30+ yards.
Guarantano only has a pair of interceptions, but the Vols have now lost ten fumbles (and put it on the ground an additional five times). The ten fumbles lost is good for 111th nationally.
