Tennessee football dominated ETSU in the first half of its 2025 home opener Saturday afternoon, jumping out to a 48-7 lead. The Vols scored on eight of 10 first half possessions while ETSU failed to record a single first down in the first quarter. Despite the dominant effort, Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel was not overly pleased with his team’s performance.
SEC Network+ and ESPN+ sideline reporter Stephanie Otey asked Heupel what he liked about his team’s performance during a halftime interview.
“Man, I’m going to be honest,” Heupel began. “I thought we were really sloppy at times. There’s a lot that we need to clean up. We need to play better. It’s in some of our targets, our perimeter screen game. Execution in the pass game. There’s a lot to improve upon.”
The Vols struggled to get their screen game going in the first half. ETSU blew up completions to Ethan Davis, Chris Brazzell and Braylon Staley while DeSean Bishop also dropped a screen pass. Drops were an issue for Tennessee in the first half as they were a week ago against Syracuse.
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Bishop had a second drop, Braylon Staley didn’t haul in a contested catch in the end zone and Miles Kitselman dropped an accurate pass that would have moved the sticks on third down. Instead, Tennessee punted in plus territory.
The biggest mistake of the first half came when Joey Aguilar was unable to corral a poor Sam Pendleton snap and ETSU recovered it at Tennessee’s five-yard line, setting up the Bucs lone first-half score.
There wasn’t much for Heupel not to like on the defensive side of the ball. Tennessee wasn’t perfect but ETSU totaled just 72 total yards in the first half and converted zero-of-nine third down attempts and its lone fourth down attempt.
Tennessee can coast past ETSU on talent alone but that won’t be the case next week when the Vols host Georgia in their SEC opener at Neyland Stadium.
Stay tuned to RockyTopInsider.com all afternoon for complete coverage of Tennessee football’s week two matchup against ETSU.
