Tamarion McDonald explains balancing the break vs getting better as team

Tennessee Football is bowl-bound once again, which means an extra month of practices for the team ahead of their season finale. While there is plenty of extra practice time — a huge benefit of making a bowl game for college football programs — the break in between games is much-needed for the players.

Take it from Volunteer defensive back Tamarion McDonald, who explained this week that Tennessee is locked in on getting better while finding some more time to rest as compared to the regular season.

Here he was on getting some rest vs. continuing to practice and improve during the bowl season:

“Kind of both. You wanna little bit of a physical break of course. But you still want to get better. So that’s how we looked at this, pretty much. Like I said, spring practice is a long time away. So we look at it as the 15 practices we have in the spring. We treat it as such. So, like, every day we write down what we want to get better at and you focus on that for that day, all right.”

The goal is always to get better, and the Vols are focused on doing just that. However, without a game every Saturday, the players are able to rest and recuperate for a few weekends before rallying for one more performance.

Tamarion McDonald says Tennessee has improved on defense this year

Tennessee‘s tremendous 10-win, turnaround season was highlighted by one of the nation’s fastest and most high-powered offenses. But the Volunteers’ defense was also much improved, and defensive back Tamarion McDonald spoke about how what they’ve gotten better at compared to a season ago.

“I would say we improved on knowing situations a lot, so just knowing where the sticks are at, where they guy is at that’s their go-to guy on their team, so we did a better job of that,” McDonald said.

The Vols did get better at situational football, especially on third downs, where last season teams converted 42% of their third down attempts against Tennessee and this year it dropped to just 34%. They also just improved in general, holding opponents to 23.5 points per game compared to 27.5 last season.

That group will be put to the test against the ACC Champs.