Tennessee Volunteers College Football Pregame Quote, 12/27/2022

On the loss of Jeremy Banks

TIM BANKS: Yeah, you know, Jeremy obviously had a tremendous career here at Tennessee, particularly these last two seasons. He’s definitely one of our emotional leaders. Great energy, great passion. So, from that perspective, it’d be hard to replace but at the end of the day, we’ve had a lot of moving parts on defense all year. So, we just have to be ready to play, we feel like some guys whether it’s [Juwan Mitchell], [Aaron] Beasley, [Solon] Page‚Ķ Those guys have played a lion’s share in the reps. Elijah [Herring] will be in there. And I expect those guys to play well. This won’t be the first time he’s not in there. It’s just up to those guys to carry on with the standard.

On how to prepare for this matchup:

TIM BANKS: I don’t think it ever changes. We can’t allow them to dictate the flow of the game. What that looks like is you can’t let them run the ball. Those guys have done a tremendous job of going back into the RPO game. It’s one of the best that we’ve seen. We have to do a great job of limiting those guys’ opportunities to put themselves in third and two situations, third and four explosive plays or early downs for us to be able to play on our terms. We can’t allow them to run the ball. We can’t allow the ball to go over our heads. I know that’s cliche, but that’s really what it is.

On having limited tape on Clemson’s quarterback:

TIM BANKS: Yeah, it’s a challenge but I’ll tell you what it tells me. It tells me how much confidence they have in the kid. To make that move in the championship game. They must really think this kid can go and the plays that he made, particularly the deep balls that he threw off schedule I felt were tremendous. Clemson has had a chance to recruit at a high level for I don’t know how long Dabo has been there. But I would assume these guys see he’s extremely talented or else they wouldn’t have recruited him. So, the sample size is small, but obviously, we went back and watched his high school tape and any mock-up duty heading into the games, and it’s very consistent. The guy has a bunch of swagger, is strong, and he’s pretty athletic. So, we know we’ve got to be at the top of our game to have a chance to be able to contain this guy. He looks like the future of Clemson football to me.