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Tennessee football will take on one of the more disciplined teams it has all season, when Kentucky comes to Neyland Stadium on Saturday. The Wildcats are a fundamentally sound football team and are the best in the Southeastern Conference in turnover margin, which is also fourth in the country.
Kentucky commits only 4.5 penalties a game for 41.88 yards, which are both SEC-best marks. Will Stein seems to have instilled a sharp and disciplined mentality across the program in his first year in Lexington. Now, the Volunteer defense has to rattle them enough to make the Wildcats get out of character.
How do they do that? Well, just stick to their principles, don’t be a hero, and let the game come to them. That sounds simple and cliché, but aside from a few bad drives at South Carolina, this Vols defense has been one of the best. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. As defensive lineman Xavier Gilliam said, “I would say for us, just doing what we do. I feel like this is just a regular game for us.”
“Well, like I tell the guys, man, you can’t hunt plays,” Tennessee co-defensive coordinator and secondary coach Anthony Poindexter said on Tuesday. “The plays will come to you. When you start hunting plays, you get in trouble. You got to try to, with disguise and defenses, Coach Knowles does a good job mixing up the coverages.”
Kentucky quarterback Kenny Minchey comes in with 1,755 yards, 14 touchdowns to one interception, and a 69 percent completion percentage. Linebacker Arion Carter has studied Minchey and knows he is a decisive quarterback that they will have to get off pace. His mistakes are minimal, and you’ll have to go back to the first quarter of Alabama in Week 2, when Minchey threw a pick-six to Luke Metz, who read the play perfectly. Since then, he’s set a program record with just one pick in his 232 pass attempts.
“Hopefully he’ll make a mistake, but you just got to play good defense. You got to play sound, you got to play steady, and just let the plays come to you. Like I said, he don’t turn the ball over a lot, this quarterback, so we just got to be patient. And at the end of the day, we just got to make stops. We got to make stops. We got to get off the field on third down.”
Third down has been a point of emphasis for this defense all season, and it carries more weight against an offense that doesn’t give possessions away. Gilliam sees it as the most important down for anyone on that side of the ball.
“Definitely, because we’ve got to be able to get off the field and get the ball back to our offense,” Gilliam said. “So in my opinion, third down, probably one of the most important downs for a defensive lineman and a defensive player.”
Tennessee also has to start better than it did at South Carolina. Kentucky had the same open week to watch film, and Carter expects the Wildcats to come in with plays scripted to go after what the Vols struggled with.
“They’ve had another week to prepare just like we have, so you got to think they’re going to have some stuff scripted up for us on things that we maybe struggled with in the past,” Carter said. “What we’ve done is gone back and we’ve done some self-evaluation and we’ve cleaned up some of the mistakes that we’ve made in the past. So with that, it’s about who’s gonna be the smartest team on the field, and at the end of the day, physicality is top tier.”
Tennessee’s defense did a deep dive into whatever issues they’ve had this season. Not only did they look at the South Carolina game, but they went as far back as week three. Heading into Saturday, this is a unit that wanted to get to the root of any problem and fix it before seeing Kentucky.
Kentucky has not really beaten itself this season. If Tennessee’s defense plays sound early and gets off the field on third down, it gives the Vols their best chance to make the Wildcats do it on Saturday.
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