Tennessee football is done opening up practice to the media during fall camp with its Tuesday practice being the final one that they let the media watch for the usual 20-30 minutes. Tuesday’s practice was the 10th of fall camp with the media being unable to watch the ninth practice of the fall— its first fall scrimmage.
The biggest storyline around Tennessee’s fall camp has been its quarterback competition and RTI has closely watched Joey Aguilar, Jake Merklinger and George MacIntyre during the open periods of practice and have attempted to track the results of every routes on air rep available for the media to watch during camp.
Let’s set the stage for routes on air before I dive into the numbers. Practice begins in the indoor facility and then the team moves outside. The media has to wait for the whole team to get out to the practice field before making our way out there ourselves. By the time we get outside on certain days, routes on air has already on the far field. On those days, we miss the very beginning of routes on air and watch the first bit from afar as we walk over there.
It’s also important to note that routes on air is not nearly as important as what happens during the 11v11 portions of practice when bullets are flying. But since Tennessee doesn’t open that part up to the media, we tracked what we could watch.
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With that in mind, here are the numbers for Tennessee’s quarterbacks during routes on air during the eight practices open to the media:
Joey Aguilar completed 91-of-112 passes while Jake Merklinger has completed 84-of-105 passes and George MacIntyre has completed 70-of-83 passes. We missed MacIntyre’s reps one day, in part making his overall numbers lower than the rest of the group.
Drops also play a part here, Tennessee receivers and tight ends dropped nine of Aguilar’s 21 incompletions, six of Merklinger’s 21 incompletions and one of MacIntyre’s 13 incompletions.
The overall numbers are relatively similar but it’s worth noting that Aguilar finished strong while Merklinger struggled a bit down the stretch. That coincided with Tennessee working on its vertical passing game more during routes on air in front of the media. Aguilar and MacIntyre threw the best deep balls during the open portion of practice.
Aguilar is seemingly the favorite in Tennessee’s quarterback competition entering its second fall scrimmage on Friday. The transfer quarterback was reportedly better than Merklinger in the first scrimmage and while MacIntyre has been a pleasant surprise, it seems very unlikely that Josh Heupel will elect to roll with a true freshman quarterback to begin the season.
