Advanced Box Score: Tennessee 25, Oklahoma 15

You can't spell slugfest without UT

It wasn’t always pretty, but Tennessee won a gritty, physical game on the plains of Oklahoma Saturday night.

Five Factor Box Score

Small update this week, each team’s stats here are shaded against the national average for this week, rather than the binary red/green measurement against each other of past weeks.

Very similar performance by both teams when looking only at these metrics. Knowing how the game went, though, you can see the Vols grinding out the win in the way those points per opportunity convert to FGs and the sacrifice of success rate in the name of 151 yards rushing, 2.9 yards at a time. The Vols had a huge edge in defensive havoc rate however, with 11 TFLs and 3 turnovers.

Rushing Report

Stuffing Oklahoma on over a third of their runs was a key factor in this game, especially with Tennessee turning the contest into a slugfest. Gaining 2.2 line yards per rush (line yards are the first four yards of a rushing play) isn’t great, and barely better than OU’s 2.0 line yards/rush, but the Vols could afford to slowly punch the ball forward, while the Sooners could not.

Player Usage & PPA

• Tennessee’s streak of keeping QBs in negative PPA ended Saturday, sort of. As a duo, Jackson Arnold and Michael Hawkins ended in the positive, with Hawkins doing most of his work in the 4th quarter in a borderline garbage time scenario.

• The Vols still have a streak of five games (back to the Citrus Bowl) of holding the opposing starting QB to negative PPA.

• Outside of a rough 2nd quarter, Nico played very well in his first true road start.

• The RBs’ low PPA numbers belie their importance in this game. Three-yard runs aren’t friendly to PPA, but they were effective in this particular game, advanced stats be damned.