There's nothing I hate more than losing to Georgia, but we knew that was likely at the beginning of the season. Yesterday's game sucked, but this is still the best Vols team we've seen in over 20 years.
Great coaches outperform, but talent still wins championships. In college football, I can't think of a single example of a team winning a national championship without top-level talent in the past 25+ seasons. Plenty of teams outperform with great coaching. Kansas State under Bill Snyder is a great example. Roster filled with 2- and 3-star players, often ranked in the 50's or 60's on the recruiting rankings. Snyder had nine 10+ win seasons in his career, but never won the national championship. We've outperformed our talent level all season and just ran into a team filled with 5-star recruits yesterday. And we still had a shot to win.
Georgia most talented team in US. Absolutely loaded with 5-star class after 5-star class. No team in America is on their level talent-wise. And there's probably not another team in college football that can play our WRs like Georgia did.
Hooker's off-day. Hooker has played well all season, but yesterday was his worst game of the season. To be sure, Georgia's defense had a lot to do with it, but his rhythm was also off for much of the day, particularly in the 1st Quarter. Several missed deep throws. Hooker also struggled with knowing when to tuck and run the ball. That said, I thought Hooker got better as the game went on. Unfortunately, we dug ourselves a deep hole early and couldn't make it up.
2 deep passes and the game goes down to the wire. The game was much closer than the score indicated. If Hooker hits those 2 wide-open deep passes, we're right in the game. The difference yesterday was that Stetson Bennett hit his open deep throws and Hooker did not.
Crowd impacted the O-line. Difficult to deny it. Our crowd caused Bama to have a lot of penalties and likely won us that game. Georgia's crowd did the same to us. 9 penalties for 55 yards and many false starts in critical situations.
Secondary struggled again. I think we've built a roster that is playoff-caliber in many places, but we're still not quite there at LB and DB. We struggled in pass coverage and those two big TD passes from Bennett won the game for Georgia.
Tillman played well. Sorta lost in that game was that Tillman played very well for his 1st "full game" back. 7 receptions for 68 yards against the best defense in America.
Big picture and looking forward
Notre Dame beats Clemson. While losing to Georgia makes our path to the playoffs more difficult, Clemson losing has re-opened the door. Clemson's weak schedule down the stretch means there is almost no way they were going to lose after this week. If they beat Notre Dame, they were probably in. The blowout loss to ND puts us squarely ahead of them, though.
LSU over Bama. Meanwhile, Bama's 2nd loss makes it difficult for them to get in by beating Georgia in the SECCG. In fact, they might not even make the CG; both LSU and Ole Miss are ahead of them at the moment. Bama running the table and beating a dominant Georgia in the SECCG would almost certainly made us the '3rd SEC team'. Now, we're still 2nd in the pecking order and have a shot at the playoffs.
4 teams ahead of us for now. So essentially only four teams should be ahead of us now: Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan, and maybe TCU. Georgia will probably win through the SECCG; and they probably get in even with a loss at this point. Ohio State and Michigan play each other, so one of them has to lose. TCU is the tricky one but they have a very good Texas team and Baylor left on the schedule, as well as the Big 12 CG (which will be against someone they've already played in all likelihood). So even if TCU ends up at #5 (behind us) this week, they'll leapfrog us if they win out. But they still have 3 tough games on their schedule, so it will not be an easy path for them.
Beat Mizzou. All that matters now is beating Mizzou. Noon game in Neyland next Saturday.
8-1. At this point in the season, we were expected to be somewhere between 5-4 and 7-2. We've exceeded every expectation of us. While the loss yesterday sucks, no one other than Vol homers expected us to make it this far. Bama and Georgia were supposed to be automatic L's. We beat Bama and we showed we could be competitive with Georgia.
Recruiting will help. If anything, this season will help recruiting in the future and make it a bit easier for us to jump into the elite talent ranks. We're not that far off right now and everything Heupel has done will help us moving forward.
GBO!
