Tennessee 17, Georgia 31: Advanced Box Score
I tried to write the opening to this post several times. One version was a rant about the refs, another was a burial of Tennessee’s inability to win big games on the road. Other drafts were variations of those themes. What I settled on was this:
Georgia is the best program in college football right now. It was Alabama for several years, but now it’s Georgia. On Saturday, Tennessee played a more competitive game against Georgia than they have in years. It was a one-score game with three minutes left. I’m not trying to convince you to celebrate a moral victory. But I do hope you see the progress. Tennessee is beating Alabama and Florida on a regular basis. They will win 10 games this year for the second time in three years after going more than a decade without a 10-win season. It’s a playoff-contending program. It sucks that the Vols couldn’t get it done Saturday. And at some point UT has to win games like the one it lost in Athens. So be pissed off about the loss. But don’t lose sight of the fact this has been one hell of a year, and it ain’t over yet.
Five Factor Review
Well I’ve been begging for the points per opportunity to go up, and they did. And somewhere a monkey’s paw curled. Tennessee had been doing an excellent job of creating scoring opportunities until Saturday, and while the defense limited UGA’s scoring opps, the points per opportunity for Georgia was nearly a TD each time. It is encouraging that Tennessee managed a higher success rate, and that the success rate continues to climb over the last several weeks.
Parker Fleming (@statsowar on X) releases a weekly chart titled “Did We Really Get Beat That Bad?”. If you won, you want to be on the right-hand side of this chart, because your success rate shows that you really did dominate the game. If you lost, you want to be on the left side of the chart, because that means maybe you were a little closer to winning the game than the final score shows. Tennessee is on the left side.
The real bellwether stat in the Five Factor chart though is defensive havoc, and the lack of it from Tennessee. Particularly the Vols’ vaunted front seven, which only managed a havoc play on 4.2% of Georgia’s snaps.
Rushing Report
If you showed me the rushing stats from this game on Friday I would be homeless today, because I would’ve bet my house that Tennessee wins. UT out-rushed Georgia 159 yards to 106, had a higher power success rate and much lower stuff rate. Had the Vols been able to pair some QB pressure with this run game and run D, the outcome might have been very different.
Player Usage & PPA
For the first time in 11 games, Tennessee did not hold an opposing QB to negative PPA, and for the first time since Mizzou’s Brady Cook last year the opposing QB hit double-digit PPA. However, the bigger story was the use of UGA’s tight ends. Nineteen percent of Georgia’s offense and 10.4 PPA came from the TE spot, particularly in the 2nd quarter when the UGA TEs caught 6 of 8 targets for 85 yards and two TDs. Tim Banks and the Tennessee defense tried some different solutions and personnel combos to try and solve the mismatch the Dawgs found with their TEs, but for the most part there was no real answer.
I’m not sure that Peyton Lewis and Miles Kitselman making up a combined 20% of Tennessee’s offense was in the game plan coming in.
Side note on the role Peyton Lewis has taken on this year. Lewis regularly finds himself on this chart each week as one of UT’s highest-usage players. That is partly a side effect of Tennessee’s reliance on the run game this season, and partly a result of DeSean Bishop being injured. But it also shows the level of trust the coaching staff has in Lewis, a true freshman, to fill this role. I’ve heard a good deal of criticism leveled at the Tennessee coaching staff for being unwilling to play talented freshmen, but I’d counter that argument with the workload Lewis has been given.