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 transcription

The really shocking thing about Tennessee in this game was just the lack of explosion they had on offense.

That’s what they’ve been so good at under Josh Heel Fitz.

You mentioned the third down situation.

I would say that first and second place are much more important to Tennessee than third place.

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

I just saw stats talking about how the best teams get those first downs on first and second and stay out of third down altogether.

Tennessee with only 16 1st downs in this game, Arkansas with 23 and then yards per pass for Tennessee 5.4 yards per pass so you would have to run the ball 5.4 yards in a hurry, not throw the ball for 5.4.

And we’ve seen Tennessee be much more explosive than this.

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

Yes, and Niko Yamalo must learn from this too.

Like me, me, I’m frustrated with the way this game ended.

I mean, you saw Hypo use a timeout where I don’t think with six seconds left to get them on the right play on fourth down during that timeout there needs to be communication with the quarterback.

Hey, we don’t have much time.

We had to clear the ball quickly.

It has to be on time because you were out of timeouts at that point.

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

And then it’s almost like he just forgot about the situation, because he ended up running past the line of scrimmage, leaving himself no choice and running out of bounds when the clock hit zero.

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

He’s a young kid who plays quarterback.

One of the things we talked about is eventually he would have a young kid play quarterback.

It’s just a human.

Now all room for maneuver is gone.

You, if you were going to play that game, I would rather you played it against one of the best teams you can learn from.

Instead, you were up against Arkin and it’s just this: This takes some of the shine off a kid who has played really, really well so far this year.

This is kind of like a welcome 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 were talking about this a few weeks ago, and you said, you know what Tennessee’s weakness is, because for a few weeks it didn’t seem like Tennessee really had any weaknesses.

And I was thinking at this point that Tennessee’s biggest weakness might be the lack of experience for their starting quarterback in Adam.

We saw that come to fruition here at some point.

The SEC is all going to beat each other up.

I mean, guys, we only have a few teams that currently have an undefeated sec record.

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

The only ones not suffering a loss are Texas LSU and Texas A and MI believe this will be a fluke and Tennessee will return to playing Tennessee football for the remainder of the season.

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