Tennessee defeated Bowling Green, 38-6, Thursday at Neyland Stadium.
Following the Vols’ season-opening victory, Bowling Green head coach Scot Loeffler met with media and discussed the Falcons’ performance.
“I told our players in there that there’s no such thing as moral victories, and there’s not, but with this young team, there was a ton to build off of in this game,” Loeffler said. “We’ve got a lot of cleanup work to do. We lost the field position battle, which led to quick scores. We couldn’t run the football very well and we had a bunch of young guys in there for the first time who need to be able to find a way to run the ball. I thought that young offensive line hung in there and at least battled their tails off. I thought our defense tackled better. I think we’re making improvement in that end. It was pretty evident that with not having two of our best targets, we can throw the football better. There’s a lot to build on. We have a long way to go. We’ve got to get the penalties cleaned up.
“Defensively, I’m really proud of the effort. I thought they really settled down in the second quarter. I think with time, we’re going to eventually have a Bowling Green defense here. I think this young offensive line is going to continue to get better. We need to keep the quarterback upright. We need to find a way—and we can with (Tyrone) Broden and (Christian) Sims back next week—to push the ball vertically. We needed to do that in this game and we struggled with it. There were some positives. I told these guys—and this is really important to our program—they were procrastinators this week. I mean that as they crammed for the test on Friday and Saturday. We did not have a good Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday practice. If this football team can learn how to practice and learn how to have juice and energy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we’ll improve and that will carry over to Saturdays.”
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