There are 138 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision this season, and Tennessee is tied for 122nd for the fewest number of penalties.
Unfortunately for the Volunteers, that has been par for the course in the Josh Heupel era.
Tennessee erased an early 14-0 deficit this past Saturday at South Carolina with a 24-3 run, but the Vols couldn’t hold on in a 27-24 loss on a last-play field goal by the Gamecocks. The Vols saw a lot of yellow throughout the contest, committing 12 penalties for 90 yards and having three touchdown passes called back.
“I know that after every game that every coach and every player says, ‘The other team didn’t stop us. We stopped ourselves,'” Tennessee sophomore quarterback George MacIntyre said during a news conference afterward. “I felt like that was very true for this game, and it was one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever played in.
“Those were some real drive-killers.”
Saturday’s setback has left Tennessee 6-2 overall, 3-2 in Southeastern Conference play and No. 16 in this week’s Associated Press poll during its lone open date of the season. The Vols no longer have wiggle room in their quest for a second College Football Playoff berth in three seasons, which will require them to play cleaner down the stretch.
Tennessee’s two losses this season have each come by three points, and the Vols committed 19 penalties for 145 yards in those two contests.
“Everybody has got to take ownership of alignment and assignment, because it starts there,” Heupel said Saturday in Columbia. “We had a holding call out on the perimeter at the end, and we knew that this crew called it tight out on the perimeter. It’s everybody taking ownership of it.
“We’re in this thing together. It’s everybody together.”
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It shouldn’t be too much to expect a program to finish in the nation’s upper echelon of fewest penalties committed at least every so often, but that has not been the case for Tennessee under Heupel. The cleanest season for the Vols in his tenure transpired last year, when they ranked tied for 80th nationally with 80 penalties and were 70th with 54.8 penalty yards per game.
Tennessee still had three games a year ago — Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama — in which the Vols committed 10 penalties, with the most devastating of those being Sham Umarov’s false start against the Bulldogs with six seconds remaining that turned Max Gilbert’s 37-yard field-goal attempt into a 42-yard try. Gilbert missed, and Georgia went on to prevail 44-41 in overtime.
The Vols were tied for 128th two years ago with 105 penalties, ranked 130th in 2023 with 101, and were 129th in 2022 with 105.
“It changes the way the game is played,” Heupel said. “You look at the first series of the game, and you’re in third-and-6 instead of third-and-1. There are so many things throughout the course of a game that change it. Some of it is penalties, and some of it is being assignment-sound.
“We’ve got to continue to grow, and we’ve got to grow fast.”
Odds and ends
Tennessee’s home game against Kentucky on Nov. 7 will have a 6:15 p.m. kickoff and will be televised by ESPN. … South Carolina’s Malik Orsan, who drilled the 48-yard field goal as time expired Saturday, was named Monday as the SEC special teams player of the week. … LSU edge rusher Jordan Ross, who spent the past two seasons with the Vols, was the league defensive lineman of the week after tallying 2.5 tackles for loss, including two sacks, during the 38-17 win at Auburn.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.