Tennessee's Discipline in Focus After Close Loss at South Carolina

Tennessee heads toward November with a simple question hanging over the program after Saturday's 27-24 loss at South Carolina: can the Volunteers play smarter football when the margin for error gets smaller?

The defeat itself offered the clearest illustration. A brief three-play stretch in the game was presented as a snapshot of the mistakes Tennessee needs to clean up, the kind of sequence that can swing a one-score contest on the road and leave a team explaining what went wrong instead of building on a win.

For head coach Josh Heupel and his team, the answer will shape the rest of the season. Tennessee still has the success it wants within reach in November, but reaching it will require correcting the errors that showed up in Columbia and avoiding the same costly lapses when the next close game arrives.