It doesn’t get much closer than a goalline stand in overtime. That was the margin Tennessee football beat Mississippi State by in its 41-34 victory in Starkville.
While the score can obviously be an indicator of how close teams play, sometimes it doesn’t tell the full story. To try to put into perspective just how good or bad a team played in a win or loss, Parker Fleming puts together weekly graphs to visualize just this.
In his ‘Net Success Rates’ graph for week five games, Tennessee and Mississippi State’s contest proved to be one of the thinnest margins in the country. Of all the teams that won, the Vols had one of the narrowest success rates over the Bulldogs.
🏈📊DID WE REALLY GET BEAT THAT BAD?
Net Success Rates in Week 5 Games(I WILL NOTE: look at the scale before you overreact to these) pic.twitter.com/mJPRWGFO04
— parker fleming (@statsowar) September 29, 2025
More From RTI: Kickoff Time, Broadcast Details Set For Tennessee Football vs. Arkansas
Fleming followed up his graph with an explanation of what it means:
“All net success rate does is strip out some noise and present a view of how two teams compared in the down to down business of moving the football. Games are won and lost with explosives, special teams, turnovers, etc, and looking at net success rate just shows us how close the margins were.
It’s a good diagnostic to go back and look at a game and learn something
• Positive net success rate and lost? Let’s identify what went wrong – were those decisive plays sustainable/likely to carry over into future performance?
• Huge net success rate and didn’t win by much? Where might you have failed to take advantage of good situations or made mistakes on drives that altered the score? What does that tell us about going forward?
• Super even net success rate? Let’s look at the weird plays! What does that tell us about the relative strength of the two teams and how they might perform going forward?”
Tennessee has an open date this weekend to prepare for Arkansas. The Razorbacks head to Neyland Stadium after firing their head coach, Sam Pittman, though. The Head Hog will be an interim in Bobby Petrino come next Saturday. Kickoff is at 4:15 p.m. ET and will air on SEC Network.
