FAYETTEVILLE — Tennessee (2-4, 2-4 SEC) suffered a 24-13 loss at Arkansas (3-3, 3-3 SEC) Saturday.
The Vols led 13-0 at halftime before giving up 24 unanswered points in the second half to Arkansas.
Following the contest, third-year Tennessee head coach discussed his team’s performance.
“First of all, you have to give credit to Arkansas,” Pruitt said. “They really outplayed us in the second half. In fact, they shut us out in the second half. Not a really good job there. We have to do a much better job coming out of halftime, but if you look at this game, to me, there are lots of things that we have to do. First thing is we have to play a lot cleaner game. That starts with me. Starts with the coaching staff. We didn’t play very good in the second half at times — gave up a couple of big plays defensively. A reverse in the first half. They bolted a guy right across the middle there, again, in the first half. 16 catches a ball down the sideline on a busted play when they had all day because we don’t rush. Our outside backer doesn’t rush there, so the quarterback held the ball there for a long time, but you should still be able to match the patterns there. Give up a nine ball when you got a guy double covered. We got to play better technique.
“I thought that defensively, even though those things happened, I thought the kids fought — they tried to finish. There are four balls on the ground, we get zero of them, and then offensively, first half we controlled the ball, knocking them off. There’s two or three plays in the first half where we don’t do very well on first down. Whether it’s not blocking the right guy or not finishing on a guy where we end up having to kick field goals. If we just stay on a guy we have to end up with 21 points instead of 13. We got to score touchdowns when you get down there close and we didn’t do that.”
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