KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — What can you say to or about Joey Aguilar after Tennessee’s 37-20 loss at Alabama on Saturday night at Bryant-Denny Stadium?
The same thing you’d say to or about Jarrett Guarantano after Tennessee’s loss to the Crimson Tide in this same stadium nearly six years ago to the day.
You can’t say much. Not if you have a soul.
You just pat them on the back, or you hug them, depending on how close you are to them.
There’s probably nothing anyone can say or do to soothe the situation for a football player who so clearly and comprehensibly errs in a moment that decides a game in one of college football’s best rivalries.
Games are what scores say they are. What they should be is relevant, because that gives us a baseline from which we can more fairly judge results. But ultimately they are what the scores say they are. Think of it like a boat in the water. Boats float, or they sink, and there’s no middle ground. They don’t sprout wings and fly. They’re above the water and fine, or they’re below the water and gone. Does it matter if they’re sent to sea full of holes, or with sailors still inebriated from shore leave? Of course it matters. What if unforeseen and unavoidable disasters befall the brave souls on board? That matters, too. Of course that matters. Those are relevant factors, and any honest investigation would include them.
What matters most, though, is the boat sitting on the waterline or the seabed.
Tennessee’s football team just went to Tuscaloosa and deposited itself on the seabed for an 11th consecutive time. A majority of those games weren’t close, but they weren’t supposed to be close. For the second time in Tennessee’s past three trips to T-Town, though, Saturday’s score was supposed to be close and absolutely should have been close, but it wasn’t close.
And in both of those games, a quarterback blunder for the ages changed everything.
On Oct. 19, 2019, then-Tennessee quarterback Jarrett Guarantano called his own number on fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line, choosing to try a sneak over the top rather than hand the ball to the running back off-tackle for what would have been a walk-in touchdown to make it a one-score game and line the streets of Tuscaloosa with lemon booty. Guarantano had the ball poked away from him, though, and it bounced to the fastest player on the field — Alabama star cornerback Trevon Diggs — who raced 100 yards to ice the game.
On Oct. 18, 2025, now-Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar woefully missed the target while aiming for a 1-yard touchdown pass on the final play of the first half, and another speedy Alabama defensive back — this time sophomore Zabien Brown — intercepted it and raced 99 yards to the end zone, turning what should have been a 16-14 or 16-10 game into a 23-7 game.
Anywhere else in the multi-verse, Tennessee handles its simple-adjacent business on one or both of those plays, and one of both of those games go down to the final minute, and the results from that point would be anyone’s guess.
There can’t possibly be another universe where both of those plays went exactly the way they went. This writer isn’t good at real science, let alone fake science, but it feels like Doctor Stephen Strange placed one finger in the air, telling Tony Stark that only one specific set of circumstances in only universe produced both of those moments. So many things are possible on every play, including plays from the 1-yard line. Very, very few of them end in 100-yarders going the other way. For that to happen twice in a three-game stretch in this storied rivalry’s at-Bama history? Obviously the odds of that were larger than 0.0 percent, but they had to be smaller than 0.1 percent.
Did other things happen Saturday night? Yes. Many other things happened, and some of them were thorny issues for Tennessee. Yet another offensive pass interference penalty wiped away a big gain and pushed the Vols back near their own goal-line, and moments later Aguilar was called for intentional grounding in the end zone, and that safety deadlocked a tied game midway through the second quarter. Alabama’s offense took the ball on the ensuing drive and marched it 69 yards on nine plays, resulting in a touchdown and PAT that pushed the score to 16-7 with 4:05 left in the first half. That’s exactly where the score remained until the hundo-burger pick-six.
But things went wrong before and after that, as well. Alabama’s third play from scrimmage was a third-and-13 from its own 6-yard line, and Tennessee missed an opportunity to sack Ty Simpson in the end zone or at least hurry him into an incompletion, and he and the Tide moved the chains to start an 11-play, 91-yard touchdown drive.
Tennessee, to its credit, overcame a few mistakes after that, and it tied the score early in the second quarter. But then it made a series of mistakes that proved too painful to overcome.
Aside from the obvious play that decided Saturday’s game, two particular drives in the second half felt particularly decisive. The Vols rallied their way back to within 23-13 early in the third quarter, and they had the momentum, and then they forced a turnover to take the ball at the Tide’s 44-yard line with 7:42 left in that period. They went three-and-out, though, and Josh Heupel frustratingly sent punter Jackson Ross into the game.
Ross quickly changed the momentum again, though, beautifully pinning a punt inside Alabama’s 1-yard line — the same 1-yard line where the ball was snapped on the pick-six, for what it’s worth.
Tennessee’s defense allowed a 14-yard pass to the 15 on the very next play, though, and that kickstarted a 99-yard touchdown drive that looked so much easier than any drive should be in that situation. Even when Alabama put itself in a bind with an awful-looking attempt at a trick play on that possession, multiple missed tackles turned what should have been a big loss into a reasonably positive gain.
Questioning any athlete’s effort isn’t something this writer on a routine basis. There’s no fear of confrontation on this end. The meek in sports media don’t inherit the earth. They get trampled on by the alpha personalities that play and coach at the highest levels. Confrontation with coaches, athletes, the public and industry peers is part of the job for those who opine in this business, and if you can’t handle that, do yourself and this business a favor and find something else to do. But the effort of an athlete is something so often misunderstood or simply misjudged by those outside the arena, and if you can be only one thing in this world, you should be fair. If you’re attacking anyone’s effort, you better know for certain that your own effort is consistently above par, and you better know virtually for certain that you’re right. Questioning someone’s physical or cognitive ability is one thing, because that’s something people often can’t control. Questioning someone’s effort is something else. It’s much more damning, because it’s something people can control. If you’re not fast or strong enough, or you’re hurt, or you mentally misjudge your assignment, there’s rarely shame in defeat. If you choose not to give everything you have toward victory, though, shame creeps and occasionally storms its way into the chat.
Long story short: Tennessee’s effort in the Heupel era has rarely given anyone serious cause for pause, but no serious person could watch Saturday’s 99-yard touchdown drive and wonder if the Vols gave it an honest go. They were blown off the ball, and their tackling — which, in all candor, hasn’t been great for much of this season — was often non-existent. It was a bad look. A bad, bad look.
The effort from Tennessee’s offense on the ensuing drive looked much more normal, and sophomore running back DeSean Bishop’s second touchdown of the game put the Vols back within two scores with nearly 11 minutes left.
Poor discipline popped back up on Alabama’s next drive, though, and those dreaded yellow flags — which are thrown with alarming regularity in most Tennessee games in the Heupel era, especially on the road — littered the field, allowing the Tide to go 75 yards in 10 plays and light their Third Saturday in October cigars.
An 11th-ranked Tennessee team going to Tuscaloosa and losing to a sixth-ranked Alabama team isn’t in and of itself an unacceptable thing. The nature of Saturday’s loss is the problem. Tennessee out-gained Alabama. It had more passing yards, more rushing yards and more first downs than Alabama. The Vols converted exactly half of the combined third- and fourth-downs they encountered in the game. The turnover battle was a 1-1 split.
By any reasonable measure, that should have been a one-score football game. Nearly every statistic puts that on the screen, plain as day.
Until you look at some of the things that matter most.
Penalties, where the Vols were lopsided losers until Bama hit the brakes on the final drive. Red zone production, where Tennessee scored twice in five trips, and the Tide scored four touchdowns on four trips.
Discipline and composure when discipline and composure mattered most.
That’s where Tennessee lost by three scores in a tough but winnable game between two comparably talented rosters.
Look at each team’s only turnover. Alabama’s lone turnover gave Tennessee the ball just a few yards from field-goal range, and the Vols punted it away three plays later. Tennessee’s lone turnover went coast-to-coast up the tailpipe and changed the game.
Saturday’s loss couldn’t fairly be placed only on Aguilar’s shoulders any more than the 2019 loss could be pinned exclusively on Guarantano. Aguilar ran the play as it was called from the sideline. He just didn’t execute. It wasn’t the perfect play call, but those harshly condemning it have gone overboard. Every quarterback running that play — and so many offenses run that exact play — is told the one thing he can’t do. He can’t throw that ball behind the receiver. That’s the only thing he can’t do. And that’s what Aguilar did. And since the goal-line package was on the field, there were few players capable of catching the speedy defensive back who plucked the ball in stride at pace.
Aguilar needed to throw that pass on target and try for six, or he needed to throw it into the stands and settle for three. Those were the only good options. He just didn’t execute, and the unthinkable and untenable again unfortunately turned into Tennessee’s reality.
Heupel’s clock and late-half management have been called into question at times this season, and some — not all, but some — of those criticisms have been fair. But the management at the end of Saturday’s first half wasn’t the worst. It really wasn’t. The players were given a chance to make a play, but at least one of them made a big mistake. Lines are so fine in a college football world suddenly rife with parity, and a 14-point swing tossed into one play is just a killer.
This isn’t how anyone in or around the Tennessee program wanted things to go for Aguilar — who remains the absolute best-case scenario the Vols could have wanted when things with Nico Iamaleava so suddenly changed the weekend of the spring game. Aguilar has been so good in so many ways on and off the field, and he’s beloved in the building for a reason. Perhaps his 2025 will have a happier ending than Guarantano’s final season as a Tennessee player. Life can be cruel at the sharpest end of college sports, but the Vols still haven’t officially been eliminated from anything, and Aguilar’s from-the-mud fairytale could turn back toward Happytown before it finishes. Stranger things have happened.
Aguilar’s mistake, as decisive as it was, would have been at least somewhat salvageable if he and his teammates had been sharper in the other 59 minutes and 59 seconds of that game. But they weren’t. Heupel’s teams just aren’t as sharp away from Neyland Stadium, especially in true road environments. If that doesn’t change, we’ve seen the ceiling for this program with this staff.
The belief on this end is that it remains too soon to say with any certainty that things won’t change. When you consider what Heupel and Co. stepped into when they arrived in Knoxville — which, in case you forgot, was hell with helmets and pads — and remember how quickly things took gargantuan leaps forward, it seems silly on this end to dismiss the possibility of things taking that final step back into the elite level this program has experienced multiple times in its history.
Perhaps you feel differently. If you do, that’s fine. There’s nothing wild about that opinion. But this writer isn’t there yet. From this angle, the distance between where this program is and where it wants to be isn’t that great. Air is thinner and mistakes are more costly toward the summit, but less-capable coaches than these have won titles. Will Heupel and his staff make the adjustments they absolutely must make? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you’ve planted both feet on the it-won’t-happen side, this writer isn’t with you yet.
If the same mistakes continue happening on the road, a point of no return will be reached. That much is certain. But if you step back and look at the college football world, you’ll see a map filled with chaos. The risk/reward calculus on this end remains firmly on the side of keeping what you have and hoping that bunch takes the final step.
But this can’t keep happening in Tuscaloosa, Athens and Gainesville. Every time Tennessee takes a double-digit loss in any of those places, the scales shift. Heupel is responsible for this, and he’s got to make the tough staff and player decisions required for any Head Ball Coach to produce a championship-caliber product. If he doesn’t get those decisions right, eventually decisions will be made for him. That’s how this works.
