Tennessee’s 2024 season came to a close in the first round of the College Football Playoff on Saturday night when Ohio State dominated the Vols’ 42-17 in Columbus.
Following the game, Tennessee offensive coordinator Joey Halzle met with the local media and discussed offensive injuries, the lack of success in the passing game and much more. Here’s everything Halzle said.
More From RTI: Four Quick Takeaways As Ohio State Torches Tennessee In College Football Playoffs
On passing game issues, Nico Iamaleava running 20 times
“A lot of the runs that Nico ended up doing was just him extending plays on his own. We did have some design quarterback run on the play he scored on and a couple 3rd and shorts. Yeah, we weren’t creating big plays in the pass game, weren’t creating big windows. We had difficulty up front. It was just an entire unit where from start to finish it couldn’t get anything to pop going right there. That’s why you ended up seeing him running with the ball in his hand a lot.”
On the message to the team in the middle of the game
“You go on the road against good competition, if you’re not playing on the right side of the margins, it gets real tough real fast. Similar to what Coach Banks said, we’ve played really good defenses in the past. Tonight we just weren’t on the right side of those margins and the small details to allow us to make the big plays on the back end.”
On how the inability to make plays down the field in the passing game hinders the entire offense
“Yeah, it’s kind of a sum of all the parts. When we’re not creating the explosives, whether it’s poor calls or poor execution, whatever that may be, it puts you in a phone booth a little bit. Those guys start teeing off up front.
It’s just the entire sum of the entire night is we didn’t stretch them enough. We didn’t force them to respect us going by them enough to make them change up what they were doing.
When you let them play comfortable, when you let them play in their game plan and don’t make them change, it creates long nights like what happened tonight.”
On what led to the lack of explosive pass plays all season
“Yeah, again, it’s never one thing. It’s a lot of situations of everyone taking a turn, like where you get somebody open and then maybe you don’t win up front and then you’re dominating up front, and then you dominate up front and you get open and you miss the throw.
Like if you just take your turn over the course of 65, 70 plays, if 11 guys take their turn one time, that’s a big percentage of your plays right there.
So it’s about playing — offensive football is always about playing as a unit. If one guy is off, it ain’t going to work. That’s what you’re fighting, you’re clawing, you’re competing for all off-season, all week in prep. And yeah, like I said, tonight we weren’t on the right side of that.”
On where they can upgrade personnel in the offseason
“You know, I’ll let Heup answer that part about the personnel, but as far as — it goes through your quarterback. That’s who it is. When you have a quarterback, that’s who it goes through. That’s why the guys in the NFL, that’s what everything is.
It’s about supplying a team around him. If you’ve got a quarterback that can make it go, our job is to make sure that we have the pieces and the scheme to allow him to be his best.”
On Dylan Sampson’s injury, how it affected the offensive plan
“We knew Dylan wasn’t at 100 percent. We knew he was going to go early and he was going to give it a shot. Whenever that guy is not at 100 percent, you know, he’s SEC offensive Player of the Year, right, he makes everything go.
So losing him and actually not even having him at full speed was tough. But that’s part of the job, is when you’re not healthy, when you’re not 100 percent, what are you going to do to get the job done. We didn’t get it done tonight.”
On how Sampson’s injury affected game planning, play calling
“It can. We knew he wasn’t at 100 percent. We were hopeful he was going to be able to go full speed tonight, and then the other thing is we didn’t get him going, too, as much as we would have hoped. But yeah, whenever you don’t have a guy of that caliber, it hurts. It makes it more difficult, yeah.”
On losing a lot of veterans on the line of scrimmage
“Yeah, so a guy like I see Cooper Mays afterwards. It’s like, man, it’s going to be weird walking into the facility the next time and him not standing in there. For those guys, when we got here, everybody had the opportunity to leave because with the coaching change and the rules with the portal and everything, and the fact that those guys chose to stay and that they’re still here and where they took this program from ’21 to ’24 where we’re in the College Football Playoff. Like, man, the Tennessee fan base should long love that entire group of guys that helped bring this program back to where it is.
As Coach Banks was saying, for the young guys in there, the message is this doesn’t happen. Like you don’t just get to go to the College Football Playoff. What those guys did to get us here, it’s now their time to step in and become those leaders, become the vocal and the physical leaders, become the guys that make the plays. They’ve been watching for a year or two years and now it’s time for them to step up, but the biggest thing is none of this ever just happens.
Nothing in this game is given. Nothing just happens by surprise. Everything is earned. Everything you get and everything you don’t get. That’s the message moving forward. There’s a lot of competition out there now. There’s a lot of open spots that are up to be taken. So we should have a really high-end off-season to go get us back to where we want to be.”
