KNOXVILLE – Bob Shoop begins every Monday meeting with Tennessee’s defense the same way.
The first-year coordinator will show the Volunteers a video of the good, bad and ugly plays from the previous game.
There’s been plenty of good for Tennessee through five games, but the ugly plays have been pretty bad, with the shorthanded Vols allowing a Southeastern Conference-worst nine passing plays of 30 or more yards, including the 47-yard touchdown pass Jacob Eason tossed to Riley Ridley with 10 seconds left last week against Georgia.
Tennessee’s ensuing Hail Mary as time expired for a 34-31 win rendered the play moot, but it certainly was a talking point for Shoop and the Vols on Monday.
“The bottom line is winning,” Shoop said Wednesday. “I say this to the defense all the time: Whether we win 56-0, whether we win a game like that, whether we lose – I use the phrase every Monday – the first thing I say is winning minimizes the problems, losing magnifies the problems. The problems still exist.
“I said to them on Monday, if (Josh) Dobbs and Jauan (Jennings) don’t make that play, we’re sitting here with a little different tone in our meeting on Monday. We’re very consistent as a staff. We weren’t pleased, but at the same time, we’d come away with a win and we’re one of a handful of (5-0) teams.”
Until the final minute, Tennessee’s defensive performance deserved to maintain the unblemished record. The Vols made a key fourth-down stop with Georgia inside the 30-yard line, forced a quick three-and-out following a Dobbs interception, gave Tennessee the lead with a sack-and-fumble recovery for a touchdown and seemingly iced the game on what Shoop called a “hellacious” interception by Malik Foreman.
All the good was nearly undone by another ugly play.
“In the last four minutes of the game, we made three really good stops,” Shoop said. “A championship team’s got to make that fourth good stop, and that’s something we talked about and that’s something we addressed in the meetings on Monday, whether that’s from me as the coach to the staff and things we can improve upon or whether it’s us to the players.”
Tennessee played man coverage underneath with two safeties over the top. Shoop said Georgia ran the same play against the same coverage earlier in the game, and Eason scrambled for a first down. At the end of the game he launched the ball while avoiding pressure. While covering Ridley, Foreman slowed down for a split second, and safety Micah Abernathy was late getting over as he shaded toward the slot receiver covered by Rashaan Gaulden.
“(Eason) made a really tremendous throw, I thought, and put it in a fairly tight window,” Shoop said. “I think sometimes as a DB your mental clock goes off and says the play must be over and he’s not going to throw it. He ended up throwing it.
“If you ask me and Buck Showalter,” Shoop added, referencing a questionable pitching decision made by the Baltimore Orioles manager in Tuesday night’s AL wild-card game, “hindsight’s always 20/20, and maybe had I known he was going to throw that ball in that situation, I might have been in a different coverage. I figured we’d play two-man one more snap and get into a victory-type concept with 10 or less seconds left.”
Shoop joked he sent a fruit basket to Dobbs and Jennings for bailing out the defense, but there won’t be any laughing if the ninth-ranked Vols continue to leak big plays in Saturday’s showdown at No. 8 Texas A&M (5-0).
Transfer quarterback Trevor Knight commands an Aggies offense loaded with speed and talent. Freshman running back Trayveon Williams is averaging 9 yards per carry. Christian Kirk (8.2 yards per catch), Josh Reynolds (20.0) and Ricky Seals-Jones (17.5) are big-play threats at wide receiver.
“The thing you have to do against these guys is you have to challenge your guys and be realistic,” Shoop said. “Is shutting these guys out realistic? I don’t know if it is, but how can we win the game? We’ve got to create turnovers. We’ve got to get third-down stops, we’ve got to play well in the red zone and do those type of things against this team.”
In five games Tennessee’s defense allowed 16 plays its staff deems “explosive,” and the Vols must minimize those against the Aggies, who lead the SEC with 20 plays of 30-plus yards.
“The stats other than those 16 plays are really pretty impressive, but you can’t ever take away those 16 plays,” Shoop said. “The teams that I’ve been on that have been really good, those plays were only 20 to 25 yards. Right now those are 40 to 50-yard plays. That’s a lot of yardage to give back on a weekly basis.”
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.