Is Tennessee Football closing the gap between Alabama?

Tennessee Football lost in blowout fashion to Alabama again, but Jeremy Pruitt believes that the Vols are closing the gap between Alabama.

If you look at the scoreboard from Tennessee football’s loss to Alabama on Saturday, it might be clear that the Vols aren’t getting much closer to beating Alabama. In Jeremy Pruitt‘s third year, he was unable to close the gap after competing through three-quarters of last year’s matchup.

But maybe the Vols are closing the gap between Alabama. The Vols trailed by only eight points at one point in the third quarter, but a third-quarter touchdown and a fourth-quarter Jarrett Guarantano fumble returned for an Alabama touchdown sealed the game for the Tide.

This year was a lot different as the Vols never trailed by one possession after Alabama took a 14-0 lead in the first quarter.

"“I can assure you the gap is closing,” Jeremy Pruitt told reporters following the game. “It might not show on the scoreboard today, but the gap is closing. I can assure you that.“That’s one thing that’s frustrating to me and it’s frustrating to our players. There are times that we’ve done some really good things. But as a team, whether it’s offense playing really good, defense playing really good, and special teams, we’ve not put any of that together. And that’s what the elite teams in our conference, that’s what they do. They don’t have many bad plays. They don’t make many mistakes. They make the other team beat them. There are times when we’ve done that this year, but we’ve not done it for a whole game. Even in the games, we’ve won, we’ve not done that.”"

Starting next year, Pruitt is going to get paid the big bucks to put everything together, so if he continues to fail at doing that, then Tennessee fans are going to continue to get uneasy. If you know anything about VolTwitter, you know that it would be in his best interest to figure it out sooner rather than later before there is social unrest on Twitter.

There are already some fans that want him to be fired, and that number will continue to increase with the more games he loses to teams that Tennessee shouldn’t lose to.

I do think that Tennessee can get closer to Alabama, but based on the Vols’ performance on Saturday, that’s not quite the case just yet. If Pruitt would’ve given Harrison Bailey a shot at leading the offense, maybe Tennessee hangs around in the first half, but the Tennessee offense couldn’t do much with Guarantano running the offense of Saturday.

Pruitt and the Vols will hope to bounce back next Saturday against Arkansas and enjoy their BYE week this week for Halloween.