Velus Jones, Cedric Tillman, Jalin Hyatt, Bru, and Hendon Hooker weren’t exactly “misfit toys”. For the most part they were all highly recruited in either HS or the transfer portal and showed their potential before Heupel got here. Our issue in 2020 was the QB, and not the skill positions. We had explosive offensive plays in Pruitt’s last year, the consistency just wasn’t there
“One final offensive note before getting to competition results, Tennessee ran a decent bit of pistol formation and had less reps with wide splits compared to its normal offense. I don’t know how much to make of it but it was worth noting”
The OL held up fine on a lot of passing plays last year. The issue was we only used half the field in a majority of the passing game and the defense had an extra player on the field called the sideline. So if a DB got decent inside leverage on our outside receiver or jammed him at the line it blew the play up. Combine those things with Nico not being able to go through his progressions and it was a recipe for disaster. We need plays that get guys open early that gives him more than 2 options from the boundary hash to the field sideline
No doubt Sampson had a great year and the overall body of work for the run game looked good. However, timing is everything and it seemed like we couldn’t score when we absolutely had to, especially in the red zone. We sputtered often, and barely hung on for many of our SEC games and relied of the defense to bail us out. We also seemed to insist of ramming it up the middle when it clearly wasn’t there or continued to throw when the run game was working. A competent offense doesn’t only score 14 against Arkansas. Just seemed like the overall offensive strategy was off.
