What Jeremy Pruitt said after Tennessee lost to Missouri

Tennessee’s quest for a sixth win and bowl eligibility hit a big bump in the road on Saturday at Neyland Stadium. Missouri capitalized on several Tennessee mistakes, blowing out the Vols 50-17. Here are the highlights from Jeremy Pruitt’s postgame presser.

Pruitt didn’t have any update on Jarrett Guarantano or Marquez Callaway, who left the game with injuries.

Opening statement...

“They pretty well beat us in all three phases of the game. They out-coached us, they out-played us, out-hit us, out-toughed us — they executed better than we did. They scored touchdowns in the red area and took advantage of our turnovers. We didn’t make a lot of tackles. We didn’t win a lot of one on ones.”

On the turnover before halftime...

“We had a chance to stay in the ballgame right before the half. The score was 19-10, we’ve got a good drive going. We had an opportunity with some field position and we make a bad throw and they run it all the way back. So it’s at least probably a ten point swing there.”

On the defense’s struggles...

“The few times that we were even (numbers-wise) in the box, we didn’t stop them. We played them man to man and just couldn’t cover them. The teams that can run the football and has a quarterback that has experience, that can handle disguises, keeps them out of negative plays — their quarterback did a good job of doing that today. That was a big thing.”

On Jarrett Guarantano...

“I haven’t seen the doctors yet. But Keller takes every rep that Jarrett does. We moved the ball there, just had a couple of turnovers. We didn’t really change our plan based off the quarterback.”

On the run game’s struggles...

“When they have more in there than we can block, we don’t need to be running, which we did multiple times tonight. We’ve got to have ways that we can spit the ball out on the perimeter. Whether it’s bubbles, slants, stabs — we didn’t take advantage of that all the time. When you’ve got six to block seven and you hand the ball off in there — sometimes, hey, you’re good enough and it works. We weren’t today.”

On the missed tackles...

“If you look at the games where we didn’t tackle well, look at who we were playing against. I said all along that Missouri was 6-4, but they had two games that they probably would like to have back. They played Alabama and Georgia as close as anyone in our league. They’ve got a good football team. I think the speed that they played with probably affected our defense. We haven’t played anyone that’s played fast in a while.”

On the inconsistencies...

“Sometimes the score don’t actually dictate how you play. You know when you go back to last week, we made 50 mental errors on defense. It just didn’t get exposed. I don’t know if we made 50 today, but I know we had some that were critical. You can’t do that. We had chances to get off the field and we didn’t do that defensively. Our margin of error is not large enough.”