Yahoo Sports’ Caroline Fenton, Jason Fitz and Adam Breneman react to the Volunteers’ 19-14 loss to the Razorbacks and discuss how Tennessee was exposed. Listen to the full conversation on the College Football Power Hour podcast – and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

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Video transcript

The truly shocking thing about Tennessee in this game was simply the lack of explosion on offense.

They were so good at that under Josh Heel Fitz.

You mentioned the third-down situation.

I would argue that 1st and 2nd downs are much more important to Tennessee than third downs.

How many first downs can you get on 1st and 2nd down?

I just saw a stat about how the best teams actually get first downs on 1st and 2nd down and stay away from third down overall.

Tennessee with only 16 1st downs in this game, Arkansas with 23 and then yards per pass for Tennessee 5.4 yards per pass that you should run the ball 5.4 yards per rush and not throw it 5.4 yards per pass.

And we saw that Tennessee was much more explosive.

So, yes, Tennessee controls its own destiny, but its entire program, its entire winning formula revolves around being explosive on offense, being able to play fast and scoring a ton of points per game, and that’s not the team that we saw against Arkansas.

Yes, and Niko Yamalo also has to learn from it.

Just like me, I’m frustrated with how this game ended.

I mean, you saw that Hypo used a, a timeout that I don’t think there needs to be any communication with the quarterback in that time because there’s still six seconds left to put it in the right one on fourth down to bring play.

Hey, we don’t have much time.

We have to get rid of the ball quickly.

It has to be on time because you didn’t have any time off at that point.

And instead of that happening, Nico runs around trying to make something happen.

And then it’s almost as if he simply forgot about the situation, because he ended up running beyond the line of scrimmage, giving himself no other choice and running out of bounds as the clock reached zero.

And it’s like with you, you just can’t put yourself in that situation.

He’s a little boy who plays quarterback.

One of the things we talked about was that at some point he would get a little boy to play quarterback.

It’s just a man.

Now all the leeway is gone.

If you were going to play this game, I would prefer it to be against one of the best teams to learn from.

Instead, you had it against Arkin and it just happens to take some of the shine away from a kid who has played really, really well so far this year.

This is a welcome moment of sorts to the big leagues.

For Niko Alya and it happens for every young quarterback.

I still think Tennessee is a very, very good, very complete football team.

But I remember we talked about this a few weeks ago and you brought it up: Do you know what Tennessee’s weakness is, because for a couple of weeks it didn’t look like Tennessee really had any weaknesses.

And I thought at that point that Tennessee’s biggest weakness might simply be the lack of experience of their starting quarterback in Adam.

We saw that come into play here at some point.

The SEC will all beat each other up.

I mean, guys, we only have a few teams right now that have an undefeated record.

I mean, Tennessee just lost to Alabama and Georgia has both SEC losses.

The only undefeated teams are Texas LSU and Texas A. MI believes this will be a fluke and that Tennessee will return to playing Tennessee football for the remainder of the season.

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