It was a natural question.

Tennessee spent the first five practices of the spring installing Jim Chaney’s new offense while adding Derrick Ansley’s fingerprints to Jeremy Pruitt’s defense.

The early returns were solid, too.

Sure, Pruitt castigated his defense after a single practice, but he noted the unit rebounded the last two days before spring break all while Jarrett Guarantano and the offense dictated the overall competitiveness the first week of spring.

But then the players went home or off to the beach, and the coaches hung with their families or squeezed in a quick hunting or fishing trip.

They all returned to the field Tuesday, so naturally, many wondered what would be Tennessee’s retention after a 10-day layoff? How would they practice?

Certainly not good enough, evidently.

“When you come back from spring break, with a week off, I didn’t think there was enough carryover from the previous week,” Pruitt said.

“So we’ve got to go back and get started and get back into the grind. The spirit and energy was there early on, but we didn’t finish the way we needed to finish.”

Tennessee can’t afford waisted days or missed opportunities on the practice field, but Tuesday was clearly one of them. Pruitt wasn’t so much mad afterwards. He even said the spirit and overall effort was good. But there was way too much sloppiness. Not enough carry-over schematically. He even lamented that the first practice of the spring had fewer mistakes.

“We we wasn’t like that the first week of practice,” he said.

“We’ve kind of got the bulk of our install in in five days, and it’s kind of second time around so you would think it would be a little crisper and cleaner.”

It will be interesting to see if Tennessee deals with such a challenge next spring. Many coaches have shifted their spring schedules after a year breaking up practice with the school’s scholastic calendar. Kirby Smart has opted against it since his first season at Georgia. Dabo Swinney did the same thing several years ago, too.

For now though, this was Tennessee’s choice in 2019 and it must rebound quickly Thursday and Friday before the first scrimmage of the spring Saturday.

Pruitt is dealing with a bunch of 18-21 year-olds, so it’s natural that there wouldn’t be complete carry-over after a long layoff. Tuesday still offered some highlights (namely special teams improvement) but Pruitt wants more steady progress. He expects it, too. That's the standard that's been set.

“It’s just we made mistakes today that we didn’t make the first day. Today was really a review day,” he said.

“We went five days, now we start over. You go back to what you put in on Day 1 and you add a few things to it, but really our installs today were really small. You would think this is the week that you start kind of creating your identity, playing the right way, probably guys have a little more knowledge of what they’re supposed to do so they can play faster. And it was there at times, but it was too sloppy at times, too.”