17 Tennessee and Virginia Tech at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night drew an NCAA single-game record crowd of 156,990. A predominantly orange-clad crowd was quiet, their team resembling a vehicle that wrecked on the first turn in the first lap.
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Her husband, a devout Alabama fan who admitted he was pulling for Appalachian State in the Volunteers’ season opener last week, was so swept up in the atmosphere surrounding the event that he wore an orange polo shirt into the stadium. The defense made big plays, forcing five turnovers while holding to Hokies (1-1) to only 10 points in the final three quarters after yielding 14 in the first. The Vols still must improve their passing attack. The Hokies have lost nine fumbles through their first two games.
UT (2-0) scored on the next play as Joshua Dobbs floated a pass to Juan Jennings on the right side of the end zone, bringing the score to 14-7 and kick-starting a 45-3 run en route to victory lane. “Against Tennessee, you can’t turn the ball over like we did, make the mistakes like we did, and can’t have penalties like we did”.
“We obviously got to do a better job of teaching or understanding or emphasizing ball security because were in adequate to say the least right now”, said Virginia Tech head coach Justin Fuente.
Tennessee’s next three drives resulted in a 38-yard touchdown pass from Dobbs to Malone, an Aaron Medley 34-yard field goal and a Dobbs 5-yard touchdown run.
Jalen Hurd ran for 99 yards on 22 carries. It was reminiscent of his 67-yard touchdown catch to tie Appalachian State in the fourth quarter of Tennessee’s Week 1 escape. That set up a 23-yard scoring strike to Alvin Kamara. “She’s pretty good about supporting me during Alabama games, even though she’s brainwashed our 6-year-old son (Cooper) to be a Tennessee fan”.
“We’ve been planning this trip since this game was announced (in October 2013)”, Christel said. You want to feed off it and the situations where it’s good, but you can’t let yourself get too high or too low.
Tennessee • After averaging just below 3 yards per carry in a season-opening 20-13 overtime victory over Appalachian State, the Vols regrouped this week and ran the ball as effectively as they did past year.
Early on, Hokies quarterback Jerod Evans looked impressive as he muscled his way through a third-down conversion then threw a seven-yard touchdown pass to Rogers to get Virginia Tech on the board first with 4:32 left in the first quarter. But a Virginia Tech fumble at its own five-yard line led to Tennessee’s first score, and that proved to be a theme of the night.
But the Hokies’ tendency for crippling errors helped the Vols gain traction.
As we get set to hand out our Smokey Points for this game, it’s worth noting that numerous players we are recognizing did not show anything in the first quarter of the game.
“It was a matter of being patient”, he said.
“We’ll look at it and come up with a plan, but what we’re doing, what we’ve done in the past, it hasn’t been an issue”, Fuente said.
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In route to their 45-24 win over Virginia Tech, the No. 14/17 Vols had two players rewrite their names into the record books.
