Tennessee held its first scrimmage of fall camp on Saturday.

Since it was closed to the media, not much has been publicly reported. UT coach Butch Jones offered some thoughts on the scrimmage when he appeared on “The Nation,” a radio show in Tennessee, Sunday.

“Just like any first scrimmage, I thought there were many, many valuable teaching tools and great teaching experiences,” Jones said. “We did a lot of situational football, and it’s amazing. You can practice and you can script all kinds of different scenarios that occur, whether it’s in four-minute offense and run the clock out or one-minute offense and you’re trying to score, one-minute defense, or 40 seconds to go and no timeouts, ball’s on the 3-yard line.”

Next week, the Volunteers will have more to focus on that just preseason practices, as fall classes begin on Aug. 17.

“This next week’s going to be critical, and then we start school on Wednesday, so the next couple days are going to be critical for the growth and continued progress of our football team.”

The number of veterans has given this camp a different feel for Jones.

“We have players that have played a lot of football for us, even though we only have 11 seniors on our football team, and you judge everything by your Derek Barnetts, your Jalen Hurds — those type individuals — Jashon Robertsons, of how they’re feeling,” Jones said. “I’ve liked our approach, but again, we need more people to join kind of in that group of playing winning football, and we’ll continue to do that. I think we have some individuals that are very, very close.

“But, for us, we just have to continue to get better day in and day out.”

[H/T: GoVols247]