Tennessee football lined up in a power formation with nine seconds left in the first half, facing second-and-1 from the 1-yard line with no timeouts.
If you run the ball and don’t score, the clock expires in the first half.
If you throw an incompletion, at least you can kick a field goal to make it a one possession game.
Instead, Vols quarterback Joey Aguilar threw behind his tight end at the goal line, and Alabama’s Zabien Brown picked off the errant throw and streaked 99 yards for a game-changing touchdown.
And with each Brown stride, Tennessee’s chances of an upset and hopes of a College Football Playoff berth dwindled. On the biggest play of the game, the Crimson Tide took a 23-7 lead into the locker room enroute to a 37-20 victory Saturday night at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
No. 11 Tennessee (5-2, 2-2 SEC) never fully recovered as No. 6 Alabama (6-1, 4-0) became only the fourth SEC team to ever win four consecutive games against ranked opponents, joining Auburn (1983), Alabama (1993) and LSU (2001).
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UT has now lost a school-record 11 straight road games at Alabama.
But 11 wasn’t Tennessee’s least favorite number on this night; 99 was.
Brown’s 99-yard pick six and Alabama’s 99-yard touchdown drive in the third quarter broke Tennessee’s back, but not its will.
The Vols fought back to score on DeSean Bishop’s 1-yard run to cut the gap to 30-20.
But the defense couldn’t stop the Tide from marching 75 yards in 10 plays to put the game away with less than six minutes remaining.
With just over three minutes left, the Vols had a chance a chance to kick a field goal to make it a 14-point game. A fourth-and-11 attempt failed. UT marched to the 1-yard line on the game’s final snap, but that was meaningless.
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“Disappointed,” said Tennessee football coach Josh Heupel. “We knew it was going to be a 12-round fight and details were going to matter.
“The play at the end of the half changed the momentum of the football game.”
Sure did.
While Tennessee had not played well in the first half and committed several self-inflicted wounds (dropped passes, penalties, poor tackling, a safety), the Vols were still in the hunt before halftime. A touchdown would have made it 16-14. A field goal would have made it 16-10.
But a Tide pick six made it 23-7. And while Tennessee football scored early in the third quarter to cut the gap to 10 points, and scored again after Bama’s 99-yard TD drive to make it a 10-point game again, you never sensed UT was going to pull this one out.
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Tennessee didn’t help itself by scoring only twice in five red-zone trips.
“Some of that was adverse situations,” Heupel said. “We’ve got to be better than that.”
UT running back DeSean Bishop was a bright spot once again, rushing for 123 yards on 14 carries, including a nifty 44-yard touchdown run. He punctured Arkansas for 146 yards last week.
“We kind of put ourselves in a predicament,” Bishop said of the first half mistakes. “We made this game way harder than it should have been.
“It just shows you that small details matter. There’s no room for errors in this league.”
But UT made plenty of errors. Not only was Tennessee football guilty of 10 penalties; they missed countless tackles and dropped crucial passes. The Vols entered the game having dropped 21 passes to rank 135 out of 136 teams, and they added about four more to that total.
Surprisingly, Tennessee rarely put pressure on Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson, who finished 19 of 29 for 253 yards. The Vols entered the game with an SEC-best 26 sacks and Simpson had been sacked 13 times. But UT recorded no sacks, and Simpson did a nice job escaping pressure.
Tennessee’s defense was solid against the run, holding the Tide to 120 yards on 32 carries (UT had been allowing SEC teams 214 rush yards per game). And Alabama’s leading rusher, Jam Miller, had just 15 yards on 12 carries.
However, the Tide converted five of 11 third-down tries and went one-for-one on fourth down, thus scoring on drives of 78, 69, 99 and 75 yards.
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Aguilar was guilty of a safety when he intentionally grounded the ball out of his end zone, allowing Alabama to take a 9-7 lead, then score a touchdown after the ensuing kickoff. He was a pedestrian 28 of 44 for 268 yards, but he did extend his streak of consecutive games with a touchdown pass to an NCAA-leading 19. Yet he didn’t make enough plays when it matter.
Receiver Braylon Staley had 10 catches for 92 yards and a touchdown. Chris Brazzell, after a one-catch game against Arkansas, bounced back with seven catches for 66 yards.
“I don’t believe they got our best today,” Bishop said.
Nope. And Tennessee football needed its best effort to beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
The post Tennessee football commits too any miscues in loss at Alabama first appeared on Off The Hook Sports with Dave Hooker.
