College Football Rewatch: Tennessee 44, Georgia 51 (2012)
Aaron Murray loved his check-downs.
If you were to combine the frame and arm talent of Tyler Bray with the football intelligence and caution of Aaron Murray you’d have yourself a pretty darn good quarterback.
In 2012, we saw two very different quarterbacks in two very different situations face-off between the hedges. The Volunteers came in at 3-1 under their third-year coach Derek Dooley at the time, while the Bulldogs came in at 4-0 under coach Mark Richt in his twelfth season in Athens where the latter sat at No. 5 in the country. The Vols had totaled minus twelve yards on the ground in their previous two meetings with Georgia and went into this game with Not Travis Henry and athlete Cordarrelle Patterson as their only hope to get things moving on the ground against Todd Grantham’s Georgia defense headlined by Jarvis Jones. The Dawgs, on the other hand, boasted two electric freshmen in Todd Gurley and Keith Marshall. Bray was going to need to throw it efficiently forty-plus times to beat the Dawgs, while Murray really needed to just find Michael Bennett on quick reads every so often to keep the Vols’ secondary entertained. Their situations could not be more different.
Fans might remember Bray’s last three drives ending in turnovers, but as you rewatch this game, you really can’t get over how Tennessee had a real shot at going into overtime late in the fourth. This was one of those games for the Bulldogs where offensive coordinator Mike Bobo got bored. The Georgia offense compiled 226 total yards with 0:37 seconds left in the first quarter. To that point in the game, the Dawgs were up 21-10 with the damn ready to break at a moment’s notice.
The first drive told you everything you needed to know about Sal Sunseri’s soft Tennessee defense. Bobo called some Malcolm Mitchell installs that had some seven yards sweeps but also some ten-yard losses. Patterson had the same role for the Vols as this swiss army knife athlete, but, unlike the Vols, the Dawgs did not have to stay cute with Mitchell if he did things like, say, bury the Dawgs’ on their own one-yard line on a punt return. After that brain fart from Mitchell, you never heard his name on the broadcast again. Instead, Bobo went with what worked, as boring as it may have been -- Gurley sweeps where he bounces it both outside and off defenders for long touchdown runs and Marshall bursts through wide-open spaces for long touchdown runs. It put the Bulldogs up 27-10 in the second quarter with the game feeling mostly out of reach.
Tennessee had no answers. After the Dawgs’ long, touchdown-ending opener, the Vols went three-and-out with some peculiar play-calling and timing issues with Bray and Justin Hunter. But the Vols had some luck in this game, starting with Byron Moore’s pick-six off a tipped pass to even everything at 7-7.
This felt like a Mark Richt staple, where the Bulldogs were more talented everywhere, but still were fighting for their lives late in the fourth quarter against the Tennessees and South Carolinas of the world, something Kirby Smart has no interest in doing. At the 7:31 mark of the fourth quarter, the Bulldogs were averaging 9.8 yards per play and were up one score on a limited Tennessee team. It was a silly, silly game that featured blocked punts, missed extra points, missed chip-shot field goals, and placekickers getting benched in the middle of the game in Tennessee’s case. If the Bulldogs simply ran Gurley and Marshall over and over and over again with Michael Bennett inside slants sprinkled this game is never in doubt.
Instead, they did things like allow Tennessee to score 20 points in four minutes.
It started with the brain fart from Mitchell that led to the Vols getting great field position and Rivera and Rodgers hitching and crossing all over Georgia territory and a score. Then, after six straight runs, the Bulldogs put the ball in Murray’s hands who got stripped on a sack that A.J. Johnson recovers. Rodgers follows that up with a quick out and a touchdown. The Bulldogs start committing to the run again and after moving the ball again Marshall coughs it up and the Vols quickly throw another touchdown to put them up 30-27 late in the second. Remember, the Bulldogs had 226 total yards in the first quarter and were up 27-10 four minutes earlier. It was clear this was not one of the elite teams in college football in 2012, even if their ranking was fifth nationally.
Speaking of bad coaching, Dooley kicked a field goal down 50-37 late in the third quarter. The Vols had surrendered 50 points to this point and, ugh, five yards of total offense and Dooley chose to kick a 28-yarder on fourth-and-short. It doesn’t matter that Brodus missed the gimme-kick. The Vols lost when the third-year coach thought making a two-score game a, checks notes, a two-score game was the right button to push on the road against the No. 5 team in the country with nothing to lose.
Tennessee wanted to run like Georgia, they wanted to have the 200-plus yards on the ground combined with 200-plus yards through the air and bury teams evenly. And while Neal had his moments in this game, the Vols stayed with the run, specifically the draw plays with a running back a yard-and-a-half behind Bray as Gary Danielson pointed out, when it was always going for two or three yards. The money was in the Patterson and Rodgers underneath routes, the quick-hitters to set up River and Hunter down the field. The Vols needed to be playing the style we’ll see this fall under Josh Heupel, not burning possessions with multiple draws up the middle that go nowhere. The Bulldogs had the talent to play the way Alabama did at the time with Marshall and Gurley, while Tennessee did not with Neal and Lane.
Bray concluded his evening with a bad fumble after trying to step up in the pocket and make something out of nothing, along with a bad interception, but his groove was the underneath stuff the Vols didn’t push enough with Rodgers and Patterson. Georgia had the running backs while Tennessee had the wideouts, but only Georgia took advantage of this fact. Patterson had his dropped touchdown for sure, and Hunter was off with Bray, but that doesn’t mean you don’t keep targeting your playmakers. You keep challenging Grantham’s iffy defense, not pretend you can play Georgia’s style, too. Georgia has to play the slow-and-steady way with Murray and his “experience” and limited arm talent, while Tennessee should have been playing with tempo and killing the Dawgs underneath and sometimes over the top because Bray could do that all stinking day. The Vols had no business winning this game, but if the offensive identity is more Mike Leach-y, they probably would have.
Blue Wire’s Chase Thomas is an independent sportswriter based out of Knoxville, Tennessee where he is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee. He also hosts the best up-and-coming sports podcast around called ‘The Chase Thomas Podcast’. You can email him at chasethomaspodcast[at]gmail.