What Jeremy Pruitt said after Tennessee lost to South Carolina

Tennessee let one slip away against South Carolina on Saturday night. The Vols led for nearly the entire game before falling behind in the fourth quarter. There’s quite a bit to dive into with this one. Here are the highlights of what Jeremy Pruitt said afterwards.

General thoughts...

“The team that really made the fewest mistakes won. (South Carolina) did a good job of being resilient. I think for our football team, there are a lot of good lessons to be learned here.”

“For us as a program, this one stung. It should have. So we’ve got to fix what we messed up and go back to work and it’s over with, ain’t nothing else we can do about it but learn from our mistakes.”

On the penalties...

“When you have nine penalties, you know, and the other team has two, we’re not good enough to overcome that. Especially when they’re undisciplined penalties, and we had plenty of those today.”

“We probably had four, five, maybe six false starts, so it’s hard to overcome that.”

On the offense...

“Offensively, I thought we played well enough to win the football game. We shot ourselves in the foot — I know one time in the red area with a personal foul penalty after the whistle blows. We had a couple of drops. We’ve got to do better than that.”

“We did find a way to run the football a little bit. We converted some third downs, put some drives together. I think our guys worked hard. Our offensive staff had a good plan.”

On the defense...

“Defensively, got one turnover, gave up explosive plays. You can’t do that. You’ve got to make the other team earn it. It’s a shame that we continue to have some guys play well up front, then we just have guys that literally just turn people loose. It baffles me. I’ve got to do a better job coaching them up.”

On the run defense...

“They blocked our guys and our guys that were free didn’t make tackles. We’ve got to be able to get off blocks. If you’re going to be good on defense, you can’t give up one for ones. You don’t play good defense that way. Then when you get there, you’ve got to be able to tackle. You’ve got to be able to line up. That would help too.”

On his team’s effort and having to play perfect...

“The men in that locker room are busting their tail. Trying to do it the right way. They practice hard, because we won’t let them do it any other way. They’re creating really good habits. At the end of the day, you get measured by how you play on Saturdays. We played some good football today, okay? We didn’t finish the game. Made mistakes. Right now, we’ve got to do things exactly right. It takes 11 of us. We’re not doing it every snap.”

On the Trey Smith situation...

“For one, we’re very thankful that our doctors did a really good job. It’s far more important than this football game. He’s out of the hospital today. Everybody knew Trey’s circumstances. There wasn’t any secrets, everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew that this could possibly happen. We had our fingers crossed that it wouldn’t.”

On Trey Smith’s future in football...

“I’m not a doctor. I’ve stayed out of that the whole time. Whatever Trey and his family have wanted to do, we’ve fully supported them. That’s not our decision, that’s theirs.”

On going for it on 4th and 7...

“A little out of (Cimaglia’s) comfort zone. The 30 was kind of his max. I think we were on the 33. Hadn’t played very well on defense in the second half. Trying to play to win.”