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Vols QB Jarrett Guarantano talks 'trying times,' rebound performance

For the first time in his career, Jarrett Guarantano tossed three touchdown passes Saturday. The Vols also won a football game for the first time in 309 days.

But after a 45-0 shellacking over Chattanooga, Tennessee's redshirt-junior quarterback had a lump in his throat, struggling to find the right words after a difficult start to the 2019 season.

"It was tough going through these past two weeks,” Guarantano said postgame.

“These past games, I’ve never really felt like that out there. I never really felt like myself. I’m glad I feel like myself again.”

Against the Mocs, Guarantano looked like the quarterback Tennessee fans were hoping to see all season.

He wasn’t perfect — his first play-action shot was an under throw that was nearly intercepted — but he connected on his next seven attempts for 142 yards and three scores. Five of his completions went for at least 18 yards.

After a 39-yard touchdown pass to Marquez Callaway, Guarantano displayed the sort of usual bluster missing from his game in 2019, celebrating with a faux bow and arrow shot to the crowd.

"There was definitely some trying times. Some tough times. I learned more about myself in the past two weeks than I ever have,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been through something like that. I’m happy to get over the hump and start to feel like myself again.”

Guarantano wasn’t interested in revealing explicitly what “something like that" was, nor exactly what he learned from his soul-searching. He praised his girlfriend and family support system, noting, "It can get rough out there sometimes."

Despite the turnovers against Georgia State and the ending in the BYU loss, Guarantano dismissed the notion he’d lost any confidence.

“I wasn’t raised that way,” he stated.

But regardless of the semantics, Guarantano was clearly in a funk the first two weeks of the season.

His normal limitations became magnified as he struggled with areas of his game that had traditionally been strengths the last two seasons (good decision-making, play-action passing, risk-aversion). In Tennessee’s two losses, he had more potential-turnover throws than he’d had all of the 2018 season.

As a whole, Saturday was a let-out-your-frustration afternoon for the Vols, but especially their veteran quarterback.

He played just the first half, and made a nice play evading a rush on a 3rd-down conversion to Josh Palmer and found Jauan Jennings in the end zone in the first quarter on a blown coverage. Guarantano looked late on his final pass — a 28-yard touchdown to Cedric Tillman — but after a tough two weeks, the play’s end result was all that mattered to the third-year starter.

“This week, I wanted to harp on details for myself. A lot of teams have been playing a lot of drop-eight and coverage against us, and I’ve been getting greedy,” he explained.

“I’ve been trying to push the ball downfield and I just need to start working completions more and more. After the first play, we got back to that.”

Guarantano’s job has never been in jeopardy this fall, and Saturday only reinforced why he’s Tennessee’s best option. Both backup quarterbacks saw action, and neither wowed. With SEC play starting next week at Florida, the Vols need their QB1 to play much more like he did Saturday compared to the first two weeks of the season. The team believes he will, and Pruitt fired back at critics even questioning their quarterback.

“You guys give yourself more credit probably than you deserve. The rest of us ain’t really worried about what you say when it comes to our quarterback. We just went business as usually,” the head coach said.

“Jarrett is our quarterback and he’ll be our quarterback until we decide that he’s not. He deserves to be our quarterback. He’s outplayed everybody.”

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