It's kind of hard to be a winner when the defense is off chasing butterflies while you're busy putting up 55 points and breaking Peyton's record of 523 passing yards in a single game. The fact that Bray's shining moment as a Vol was overshadowed by us nearly losing to Troy is an utter disgrace.
Let me just throw some stats out there. In 2012, our offense averaged 36 points a game. Now, that's a lot of points. You put 36 on the board and you expect to win, right? You certainly don't expect to lose 7 out of 12. To put it into perspective, Alabama's much ballyhooed offense averaged 38 points a game with an absolute cupcake of a schedule and went on to become national champions.
Unfortunately, our defense also gave up 36 points a game. And that is... completely unacceptable, not even in the same ballpark as mediocre. To put THAT into perspective, you could triple the average that Alabama's defense allowed per game (11) and it would still be less than what our defense was giving up. That's pathetic.
To put it all into even more perspective, I'm not even exaggerating when I say that the 2012 Tennessee defense was the worst in Vols history. It literally, statistically was the worst ever. So I don't care if we had Geno Smith, Matt Barkley, Mike Glennon, or the freaking lovechild between Peyton Manning and Joe Montana at quarterback; that guy would have been no more a winner than Tyler Bray was in his time at Tennessee.
