Tennessee didn’t steal a win Saturday night in Neyland Stadium and upset Georgia, as it looked like the Vols might pull off early in the contest, but at least they put up a good fight. That’s not something that could have been said a few times this season for Jeremy Pruitt’s squad following the 1-4 start to the season.

An overmatched Tennessee squad jumped out to an early 14-10 lead in the matchup thanks in part to the emergence of freshman quarterback Brian Maurer, who made his first career start in the game. Maurer helped provide a huge spark to Tennessee’s offense and kept the crowd in the game for the first half until the Bulldogs managed to rebound and take control just before the halftime break.

The Volunteer defense also showed plenty of fight in this game, forcing Georgia to attempt three field goals, two punts and a three and out in the first nine UGA possessions of the game. In the end, the Bulldogs overpowered the Volunteers 43-14 and Pruitt wasn’t really interested in celebrating the better showing from his team on Saturday night.

“Our No. 1 goal is to win every game, every game that we play. That’s our No. 1 goal,” Pruitt said in his postgame press conference. “We don’t walk out there and say ‘I hope we play good tonight,’ or ‘I hope we play good for the first half.’ Our goal is to find a way to win every game. That’s the bottom line. And that will always be our goal.

“Until we start doing that around here – we aren’t going to stop. That’s got to be the expectation. Our kids hurt, they put a lot into it but Georgia made more plays than we did. They probably did a better job coaching than we did. It all goes into that. It all starts at the top and rolls down. We’ll go back and look at the film and see what we need to do to improve.”

While Pruitt may not have been willing to accept a simple moral victory after the game, SEC Network analyst Gene Chizik saw something in Tennessee’s performance that should give Vol Nation some hope moving forward into the second half of the team’s schedule.

“Make no mistake, Tennessee fought today,” Chizik said after the game on SEC Network program SEC Now. “You talk about the two 10-play drives [by Tennessee’s offene], that happened. You saw defensively they fought, there was no give up. They took a week off and heard a lot of stuff and they responded today.”

Chizik makes a good point. Tennessee could have easily wilted in the face of mounting pressure but going up against the toughest challenge to date of the season, the Vols responded with arguably their best performance of 2019. If, and admittedly this is a big if, Tennessee continues to show the same fight all season long, the Vols will turn the ship around and likely will earn a few conference games before the season ends.

That’s not something that would have been uttered heading into the Georgia game but it’s a possibility now with Maurer under center on Rocky Top.