We don’t have to have a world beating defense for banks to stay. I think the 3 biggest areas we need improvement on are 3rd down, red zone, and forced turnovers. Hard to have a great total defense with the offense putting them on the field so often (which they’ll do whether they are good or not because of the speed). But forced turnovers is supposed to be the strength of a Heupel defense. And if we could just bend but not break, get off the field and force field goals instead of touchdowns, the defense would seem remarkably improved (even if it’s really not that different from the year before).
Quoted for truth.
Here's precisely how good our defense must be:
- For most regular season opponents--say, all but the two best, currently Bama and UGa--the defense must ruin enough opponent scoring drives to reliably allow our offense to outscore and win the game. The word "reliably" is the key, given the "on any given Saturday" nature of football. So it has to be some percentage better than just barely good enough to do this. For example, if our offense scores a TD 70% of the time we get the ball against most opponents, our defense needs to reliably stop those opponents 35% of the time; say 40% with a buffer.
- Beyond reliably allowing our offense to score enough for a 10-2 regular season, the defense must regularly--not always, not every year, but often enough--slow down the top teams (Bama and UGa currently, plus whoever we play in the post-season) enough that we can win championships. Again, not every year. But often enough.
In other words, we don't have to win every week by 48-10. Winning 48-35 is fine.
That's the defense's job.
In any program led by Josh Heupel, the offense will be the star of the show. The defense only has to be good enough so that the offense doing its thing is enough to win.
I like the three areas you mention: 3rd down, red zone, and forced turnovers. Of those three, the least important is red zone. If we haven't stopped them by the time they get to those final 20 yards--by 3rd down stops or takeaways--that probably isn't one of the drives where we're going to go further ahead of them. So highlight those two goals, especially.
Go Vols!
p.s. For clarity, we would certainly all love winning every game 48-10. Or even 48-0. That would be super. But having a top-5 defense isn't necessary to win championships as long as we have a top 5 offense. Sure, though, if we could have both, bring it on!