What happened on Jarrett Guarantano's goal line fumble against Alabama?
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Jeremy Pruitt was “pissed off,” and why wouldn’t he be?
Midway through the fourth quarter, the Vols were two inches away from being in a one-score game at No. 1 Alabama, and Nick Saban’s former lieutenant was looking to put an October scare into his former boss.
Instead, Jarrett Guarantano fumbled at the goal line, turning a potential Tennessee touchdown into a game-sealing 101-yard scoop-and-score for the Tide.
Tennessee’s much-maligned redshirt junior appeared to call his own number on the sneak, and Pruitt lit into Guarantano on the sidelines after the fumble, grabbing his fasemask at one point. Expert lip readers on Twitter allege that Pruitt asked Guarantano why he snuck it, but despite benching Guarantano for third-string quarterback JT Shrout the rest of the game, the head coach chose his words carefully when discussing his backup quarterback postgame.
“There was some miscommunication out there. And that’s our fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the coaches’ fault, ok, starting with me,” Pruitt said.
“It’s no reason to hurry up. The ball is this far from the in line. We ran two quarterback sneaks earlier in the game by pushing the pile and our guys, they dented the front a little bit right there. So, talking about it there on the sideline, we could either go back with it and run the sneak and we elected to run a sneak. Shouldn’t have jumped over the top. Should’ve pushed it there in the middle.”
It’s here where we must note that Tennessee had played valiantly up to that point and that Guarantano never would’ve been in the game had Brian Maurer not suffered a second concussion in as many weeks. Once inserted into action late in the first quarter, Guarantano missed a touchdown throw to Jauan Jennings, didn’t see Tim Jordan on a wheel route and held the ball too long on multiple drives, finishing 7 of 16 for 55 yards.
And yet, behind an offensive line playing as physical as it had all season, the Vols continued to move the ball, going 66 yards in 14 plays to get within a whisker of the goal line to make it a one-possession game.
Suddenly, a Bryant-Denny Stadium that only planned to stick around for the light show was glued to its seats for a potential heart-racing finish.
Jim Chaney dialed up three straight runs inside the five, keeping the ball out of Guarantano’s hands. With inches to go, the fourth down call looked eerily similar to the third down call, as left guard Trey Smith pulled outside and Quavaris Crouch waited for a handoff. Instead of a dive, however, Guarantano improvised and tried to Superman his way into the end zone.
He was stoned immediately, tried to shovel the ball forward and watched as Trevon Diggs picked up the turnover and out-ran everyone for a score.
It was as humiliating as it was shocking.
I asked Trey Smith postgame if the playcall was a handoff and the junior lineman would only say, “I’m not sure. I don’t want to give the details of our calls. It was a miscommunication.”
Center Brandon Kennedy was a tad less evasive, noting, “When we left the huddle, we had one call but I’m not sure what happened between that.”
What happened was a disaster, and sadly, the play was an encapsulation of Guarantano’s career: Good intentions featuring mostly calamity.
The red zone has been a house of horrors for Guarantano throughout his career, including his previously improvised audible on the goal line at Florida in 2017. And yet somehow, Guarantano’s decision Saturday night was still inexplicable.
The Vols left Bryant-Denny Stadium full of what-ifs after giving the top-ranked team a real fight, and yet, a night full of promise will mostly be remembered by a play that left a head coach mystified and frustrated.
“It’s not deflating. It pissed me off. I would’ve liked to see us get the ball in there and seen what we could’ve done,” Pruitt said.
“There are lots of things that didn’t go our way in the game. Some of it we controlled, some of it we didn’t. So we’ll watch the tape, learn from it and go from there.”