The Official #4 Tennessee @ Arkansas Game Thread, 7:30 PM ET, ABC

[RockyTop140]

Admittedly the passing game looks horrible. Alarmingly bad.

Arkansas passing game looked better than the Vols.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. My question is how long can we look like this on offense before heupel starts to catch serious heat? This is supposed to be his strong suit. The people talking about Hooker/Golesh being the reason are starting to sound correct.

 

[allstar34bd]

I just think a majority of the starters aren’t interested in playing for their school anymore. We have like 3 passionate players and the rest are knuckleheads.

NIL has capitalized the ME in tEaM. No leadership. Just overpaid athletes.

Look at Ryan Williams today. Taunting ten yards away from the goal line while down by 12. Divas will destroy the game.

 

[vol94]

The running into the punter changed everything in this game. No way you can even get close to the punter in that situation. We were in control to that point.

Yep! Stupid penalty! They is no upside getting too close to the punter in that situation.

 

[patrick]

Do you really think he doesn't have confidence in Nico or is that he doesn't trust his OL 2 things can be true or it could just be 1. Hard to trust a QB fully who has not really played a lot when his older more experienced tackles get beat like a drum. I don't know but they have to find a little more room for Nico to settle into a game

I don’t think that Heupel trusts Nico. One reason being the oline is just bad. The other being Nico’s youth.

I do now wonder if Heupel-Hooker was more of an aberration than the reality of the Heupel offense - maybe Heupel just aired it out with Hooker due to his limited roster. But who knows.

Also Heupel must adjust his offense with the defenses that are being thrown at his offense.

Undisciplined football across the board. That is coaching deal.

 

[KeyVol14]

I bought into the Nico hype after the bowl game last year and the first few garbage games this year but these last few games have exposed him. He’s not even one of the top 6 QB’s in the SEC. He’s a huge disappointment. All of his talk about loving to play on the road and then craps the bed like he did tonight. Starting tonight the Vols began a tough stretch and after watching Vandy play, I’m now worried about whether or not the Vols can beat them. Good lord, after last week and this week I’m no longer a confident fan. I’m thinking 8-4 might be the best this team can do.

Disappointment? He wasn't the reason we lost tonight.

Play calling is awful, o line is trash, and receivers aren't getting open.

 

[Vol737]

I’ve just not looked at this team and thought they were as explosive offensively as the 2022 team. Nico is very talented and will get better, but I think Hooker, due to experience in the colllege game, was more cerebral. I think Nico will get there.

We are just flat out not developing O linemen at all. That’s a huge problem. DBs don’t sound like they’re all that better than the guys we had. Arkansas is a pretty decent team and should probably be 5-1 as they had OK St on the ropes. Tough place for the Vols to play out there.

This is why you can’t read anything in to beating three really bad teams and an OU team that was very pedestrian on offense. We are probably lucky OU didn’t start their freshman QB. Something has certainly changed offensively from having receivers wide open all over the field and making plays in 2022 to this offense now where they cannot get open or get separation. Is it Halzle? Idk. But it’s a vast departure from when Golesh was here.

 

[Dergibvol]

3 plays from the 25 and not one was a shot at the endzone

And failed to call a TO so the first play took 18 seconds off the clock

 

[VFL 89]

Oh how quickly Vols went from a hero to a zero. That's what happens when you're a ranked team with a target on your back! Everyone wants to knock you off...and Arkansas did! Team just wasn't prepared. Got outcoached and outplayed. Vols got knocked down and how they respond is up to them. Someone better have a team coming to Jesus meeting pronto! Time for the captains to step up.

Next week's performance against Florida will help set the tone for the rest of the season!

 

[DooleyOrangePants]

Bad OL play. Poor secondary tackling in first half. False starts. Roughing the punter stupid. Less than desirable clock management at the end. Can’t get Sampson in a pass route because he has to pass block. Love Bishop, but he miss too blocks while pass protecting. WRs need to be a lot better. I’m sick of all of the WR screens and same dang run play. We need to be creative because we are not great on offense when playing SEC teams.

I think the WR talent is there and the RB stable is as good as it gets. But Sampson up the middle or Bishop up the middle is only going to go so far. Hardly anything to move the defense from the line. We don’t run anything in the 5-10 yard range with the WR’s, seem to have abandoned using the RB in the pass game and we telegraph the deep pass and who we are targeting when we do throw.

Part of this is the O-Line. It’s not so much they are bad, they are just completely undisciplined. That should not be the case with an older unit.

 

[SonOfGodVolforlife]

Well, there's only 1 undefeated team in the SEC now, not the end of the world, but road issues continue... I hope we can play lights out at home the next 4 games, then we're still in it.

So glad we’re coming back home. The offense needs the extra juice

 

[LibertyVolance]

Give Arkansas all the credit. Their defense dominated the Vol passing game and offense. This offense squats, OLine gave up 4 sacks, Nico is slow in decision making, receivers aren't as good as advertised, the routes were predictable, and motion penalties are redundant. The coaching, including play calling, was abysmal.

Arkansas had the better QB and offense and are probably the better team.

 

[BreatheUT]

Fall Saturdays are too beautiful to let pathetic football ruin. Hopefully soon I will learn to not revolve my Saturdays around it.

I'm just saying sometimes we have unhealthy obsessions to things. Sometimes opportunities come along for a reset.

 

[SonOfGodVolforlife]

Oh how quickly Vols went from a hero to a zero. That's what happens when you're a ranked team with a target on your back! Everyone wants to knock you off...and Arkansas did! Team just wasn't prepared. Got outcoached and outplayed. Vols got knocked down and how they respond is up to them. Someone better have a team coming to Jesus meeting pronto! Time for the captains to step up.

Next week's performance against Florida will help set the tone for the rest of the season!

This 100, if we don’t get it together we could very easily drop another one against the gators so let’s see how this team responds. The

 

[Vol737]

They’ve scored 3. Where’s this magnificent offense?

Apparently they didn’t need to be magnificent, just better than ours. This is nowhere close to our 2022 offense and we still have massive problems in the secondary. I

 

[allstar34bd]

lol Sampson with the honesty in the post game press conference. I think he spoke up on purpose. I’d be frustrated with this teams focus and discipline as well.

 

[orangepenez]

Had a bye week to prepare and we were totally outschemed and outplayed on both sides of the ball. Play calling all of a sudden turned to trash at OU and they called the exact same game tonight thinking the D would bail us out. But Petrino saw it coming. What the hell is Nico doing running out of bounds on the last play of the game? That reeks of Milton. We’re nowhere near a top 5 team. We went from being the most fun team in the nation to watch the first 3 games to the most boring and frustrating. It’s a real head scratcher.

 

[vols 30]

Disappointment? He wasn't the reason we lost tonight.

Play calling is awful, o line is trash, and receivers aren't getting open.

He was a big reason why UT lost.

 

[SonOfGodVolforlife]

Bad OL play. Poor secondary tackling in first half. False starts. Roughing the punter stupid. Less than desirable clock management at the end. Can’t get Sampson in a pass route because he has to pass block. Love Bishop, but he miss too blocks while pass protecting. WRs need to be a lot better. I’m sick of all of the WR screens and same dang run play. We need to be creative because we are not great on offense when playing SEC teams.

Remember when Tn use to have open receivers running down the field? Like once or twice a game we would score from 60 out on a busted defense. What happened to that huepel

 

[patrick]

The 4.8 yards per carry isn’t the reason why. We’ve ran the ball well. That’s not our problem

Sampson said post game that the Vols were lackadaisical during the off week. Interesting that in my self-embarrassment I identified early in the game that TN was over confident and was getting outplayed.

Hmmm maybe you need go back to coaching school.

 

[Vol8188]

Sampson said post game that the Vols were lackadaisical during the off week. Interesting that in my self-embarrassment I identified early in the game that TN was over confident and was getting outplayed.

Hmmm maybe you need go back to coaching school.

Lmfao

 

[FanDude]

Losses to UF, Bama, UGA and possibly Vandy now.

Haply Kentucky is no effing good. Wait. Oh darn it. That game might not go smooth.

 

[JohnnyD123]

Having two back to back SEC road games hasn’t helped

He’s coming off a bye week

 

[cherokeeeVOL]

I think it’s more like Heupel has little to no confidence in this line to protect him.

This is where I am too. Not much can be done to “coach around” bad O-line play I don’t think, especially not with this offense. Running to the edges doesn’t appear to be an option with this offense so you just kind of hope the QB can read it and react and scramble when needed I think? Rough night but not the end of the season IMO.

 

[BigALWiLson]

I don’t think that Heupel trusts Nico. One reason being the oline is just bad. The other being Nico’s youth.

I do now wonder if Heupel-Hooker was more of an aberration than the reality of the Heupel offense - maybe Heupel just aired it out with Hooker due to his limited roster. But who knows.

Also Heupel must adjust his offense with the defenses that are being thrown at his offense.

Undisciplined football across the board. That is coaching deal.

Well to be fair Nico is a lot younger and less experienced than Hook was. Nico also doesn't have Hyatt and Tillman who could separate. Not sure why the guys we have can not separate consistently. The hope is we find that and mix in more intermediate routes. The running into the kicker thing was probably one of the dumbest situational plays I have seen in a long while. I think Josh needs to make some changes. For one Karic should sit and put Davis in at G. GE while he is a good OL coach isn't great. Not sure if that will happen. Not sold on Pope. And of course Martinez. Nico needs some designed runs early to get him into the game. A few plants wouldn't hurt either to get that feel good. I wonderd if leaning on the D at OU hurt Nico's confidence ?

 

[DooleyOrangePants]

Disappointment? He wasn't the reason we lost tonight.

Play calling is awful, o line is trash, and receivers aren't getting open.

WR’s are getting open, problem is, we aren’t reading the field and looking at the second and third options. Nico would lock on and not look away and by the time he looked somewhere else (if he did at all), they were covered. Plus, we are completely predictable in our play calling right now.

Everything else I agree with you. I just get this sinking feeling that something is off in that locker room. Very little fire at all from our guys in a season that has/had all the promise in the world.