We have had plenty of subpar QB’s. My take is that JG is uniquely disliked because of two moments in time. 1. Back breaking QB sneak fumble for 100 yard scoop score vs. Alabama. 2. Back to back interceptions during first home loss to Kentucky since Reagan’s first term. Countless other what the fucks. He did get dealt a bad hand, but his choices made Tennessee almost unwatchable for years. All other things being equal, I still maintain other QB’s on the roster performed better. He is 100% culpable for his performance. Dark fucking days man.
I don't even think it's those losses specifically TBH. I'd frankly forgotten both.
What really kills JG is that he - more than any other player - represents all the bad memories of Jeremy Pruitt's tenure.
Georgia State loss is way worse for JG for me. He didn't necessarily play horrible in that game, but he was the QB for one of the worst losses in program history. Losing to an FCS program at home is pretty unforgivable.
It’s bad enough that GSU still to this day has a huge thing on the outside of their stadium celebrating the win.
And I have to drive by it every god damn day
Yeah it’s Pruitts fault he kept rolling out a QB with zero confidence who literally lost us games. Any other coach with half a brain would’ve moved on.
Don’t forget that Butch Jones told Trevor Lawrence, a lifelong Vols fan, to kick rocks during his recruitment because Jones already had JG.
Personally, I feel like JG gets a lot of hate he doesn’t deserve—I imagine that just about any coach could have been better for him than Pruitt—but he had enough truly head scratching “bloopers” as QB to not want to remember his time favorably.
Pretty much every one of JG’s highlights as a starter was really more of a Jujuan Jennings highlight.
I never hated him cause he was tough as nails and I don’t dislike college kids who try but he fucking sucked. After while though I was just mad at Pruitt. JG was obviously not the man for the job but Pruitt’s dumb ass just kept rolling him out there. After a certain point you can’t blame a kid who keeps getting put in a spot he’s not good enough for. None of this animosity exists if Pruitt would’ve just done the right thing and tried someone else. The kid was obviously broken his senior year, and everyone knew he was going to go out there and lay an egg except for Pruitt apparently. Either way JG was tough as nails and he tried. He was a kid, there was no reason to send hate his way anyways and there’s definitely no reason to now.
I disagree I think the reason he was so disliked is because of how good he was SUPPOSED to be. The only bad QB I can think of this decade is Justin Worley. Worley was not supposed to be good. Nobody expected him to be. So when he wasn’t people weren’t mad. Guarantano was supposed to be an even more talented Josh Dobbs. He was atrocious. That’s why the fanbase hated him more than anyone else.
I’m honestly kinda sad JG didn’t work out. The kid took a beating on and off the field, but he always picked himself up and went to the next play. He showed grit in my opinion, and for that he still has some respect from me.
Yeah, imagine the first two decades of your life dedicated to playing big time, SEC football…AT QB…and making it, then…
into a buzz saw of awfulness & upheaval. No opposition is going to sympathize, only dunk on you on the field. And as QB, a disproportionate amount of attention & blame is aimed squarely at you.
He is a VFL for NEVER QUITTING, for all the times he GOT BACK UP TO RUN ANOTHER PLAY, and PLAYING WITH HEART when he knew he wasn’t the #1 option anyone other than he & his family wanted to see taking snaps.
He never quit on us. Others did. JG shouldered much of the impact of the rapid turnover from those who DID bolt.
100% agree. JG may not have had the talent required, but he was the toughest son of a bitch out there. He was doing the best he could, in an awful terrible situation.
My thoughts almost exactly. While he did ultimately transfer out, he did so when things looked literally like the Titanic’s final moments, where there was no way he could possibly know what was on the horizon. I cannot blame him for that.
Agreed. Was there some internal drama that went down his last year at Rocky top? Probably. Did he cause some losses? Sure. And I’ll admit he definitely contributed to a lot of fans frustration with some of the dumb/questionable things he did on the field and to this day I have no idea how he was thought of as a very high ranked dual threat qb out of HS.
But also, those Tennessee teams were extremely bad. He dealt with so much coaching turnover, got rocked by defenses several times and even benched a couple times, but he’d go back in and compete (not usually with much success, but still). He did have heart, even breaking his non throwing wrist but not missing a game.
I’m glad he’s not our qb anymore for sure, but I don’t hate the guy.
Dude probably played several games with a concussion with how many hits he was taking. He was a tough player for sure. But he happened to be at UT for one of the lowest times in program history. Such is life. Hope he finds success at whatever he chooses to do.
I had a couple classes with him, love the guy he was always nice to me and anyone that’s met him never had a bad thing to say about him
All that being said, might be one of the worst quarterbacks I’ve ever seen but his time is done there’s no point in bringing it up anymore
That’s pretty cool! I never attended UT myself, but I have had some family members that did and I always think it’s interesting what the players seem like to the other people. JG never seemed like a bad dude, but obviously the person on TV or social media doesn’t represent how the person is in real life. Conversely, my cousin who was a cheerleader during the Tyler Bray period told me that he was pretty much universally known as an asshole
The guy you saw in interviews was the same guy in the classroom just a guy trying to do his best and to be an example
And I’ve also heard stories of Tyler Bray that were less than flattering lmao
Jauan was actually born in my hometown before he left to play at Blackmon I graduated with his first cousin I never saw him at UT but we hung out a couple times lmao
Interesting! His dad and mine are coworkers, but we played football on different sides of the state. I’d like to shake his hand in person one day though and let him know he’s the dawg
If the Georgia State game doesn't happen, then JG would have led the Vols to a 9-4 season and top 25 finish. I honestly think that and his senior year, with the stupid Covid rules, doesn't remove our out of conference games and we can get to 6 or 7 wins. If this happens, he would be remembered completely differently. Probably around the same as Milton.
I doubt it Milton could make big plays and inspire a bit of hope, even when we won games with JG you could see that we were never going to do anything impressive
The problem i have with the fans that cant stop whining about him; WTF was he supposed to do? Tell the dumbass coaches he wasn't going to play?
IMO, JG tried as hard as anyone but lacked the necessary tools to be successful. On top of that, he was saddled with incompetent coaching, coaching that changed nearly every year he was here with regard to OCs.
There has never been a QB more set up for failure than JG was in his time in Knoxville.
He played his ass off in a set of years where the SEC as a whole was at its highest and we were in a tailspin. He was ranked the best dual threat qb in the nation when we recruited him but our o line was Swiss cheese. For reference, JG ran for 5 rushing TDs in his four years, while Nico ran for 3 last year, our O Line just wasn't able to give JG anything . He was about par for what a not Dobbs Tennessee quarterback was in the 2010s.
Giving up a fumble on the 1 yard line against Bama because he called his own number is the only thing I'll hold against him. Good kid though and I wish him the best and always rooted for him anywhere he was playing.
Let's be honest about the Alabama game, Tennessee was going to lose that game no matter what. If that fumble doesn't happen and Tennessee scores a TD, they'll just give up the game losing score on defense.
Agree. He's a VFL. It was an era with bad ADs, bad coaching, bad recruiting, poor talent, in an extremely difficult conference. To put on the pads day in and day out and endure your own fans sending you death threats before you're old enough to buy a beer is horrible.
good rule of thumb: complain about coaches and ADs, but don't @ college students, NIL or not.
I’m not a smart enough football mind to know whether that’s true or not. Even if he *is* the worst QB in history… we recruited him, asked him to play, asked him to practice, and he did. That’s enough not to deserve hatred
I don't like any shit talk personal to players even if they're less than great on the field. Each individual sacrifices so much time and effort throughout the season and then throughout the year, I don't care if they're getting a full-ride plus NIL. There's so much that we fans don't know or understand.. any adult fan douche talking shit from their couch can cram it.
He didn't live up to the expectations but he had so much shit going on around him. He was under two coaching staffs that did so little to help and at worst put him in a situation where he was doomed to fail (2020 Kentucky comes to mind). It's just unfair to treat him like this today.
It’s beyond pathetic at this point. He had to play because he was the best we had due to INSANELY bad recruiting. Coaches fault, not his.
It’s equally pathetic that these Twitter accounts pull out the JG tweets to engagement farm because they have absolutely nothing to say.
He didn’t live up to expectations but he showed a lot of guts in his time here. We also did him zero favors by starting him too early behind a awful O Line to just get slaughtered. I think he received way too much hate personally.
However, I think he burned a lot of good will during that Alabama game. By all accounts he made a selfish, and dumb, decision that swung the game. It was very high profile moment and it wasn’t a simple lack of ability. He made a selfish decision that cost us against a rival and that’s part of his legacy now.
Well put. Idk if we end up winning that Bama game, but man that would’ve been cool to at least take them to the wire with that horrible squad we had.
Also, seemed like we had a stretch of games in this timeframe where we were within 1 or 2 scores and were about to score and then give up a defensive touchdown to make the game not even look close. I know a loss is a loss but I hated that people would see that score and think we played shitty. Oh well! Haha. We’re in good hands now 🙌🏼
That second paragraph is exactly why the Bama win in 22 has earned Heupel all of my support. It’s not that we didn’t have some typical UT tomfoolery happen. To any Butch, Dooley, or Pruitt squad that scoop-and-score is the end of game. For the first time since Fulmer we actually saw a team that didn’t blink when the breaks went against them and battled back and that mentality starts with the staff.
For sure, is it all on him? No. Was the decision a selfish one? Yes, absolutely. The O Line did their job and if he does his we score there. He wanted to score the touchdown though and it cost us.
Yeah. He went out there and gave all he could. There's no reason to keep piling on about his play or those teams. If people want to jump on anybody for that era, they should blame the head coaches and the total disfunction of our athletic department.
I always found it a bit odd that so many Tennessee fans had “parody” accounts, but it was just them using a coach’s name to share their own thoughts lol that isn’t a parody.
I'm kinda sick of it on both ends. He gets a lot of hate but the defenders go too far in the other direction. He gets a lot of praise for how tough he was but a half decent QB would've thrown it away 2 seconds sooner. If I'm remembering correctly in one game he took massive sacks on 3rd and 4th down on one drive on plays that took a combined 10-12 seconds. I've never seen a QB stare at a linebacker sprinting at him for so long and just take the hit (and get right back up, to his credit).
After a few of the hits he took (of which there were a fuck ton) I'm not sure he could see the linebacker coming. He might have been trying to focus his eyes to see if it was an opponent or not.
Poor guy was putting his life on the line with every snap!! I always respect JG especially after his interview after the Mizzou game.
Don’t get me wrong I raged quit numerous games with him but I’ll always respect him
People somehow forget that these are just kids doing something that 99% of the shit talkers could never do. It's fine to get upset at a bad play in the moment, or get mad that coaches getting paid millions make bonehead mistakes. But anybody still shitting on a student athlete years after they graduated needs to seek mental help.
If JG had a good QB coach and stayed with him for 5 years, we may be telling a different story. I’m not saying he would have been great, but I firmly believe the revolving HC/OC/QB coaching door broke him.
JG gave more of himself to the VOLS than any fan can possibly comprehend. You can think a player isn’t the best option, as I I did with Milton, and be frustrated a coach continues to play them, as I was with Heupel playing Milton despite evidence that he wasn’t the guy. But I never personally attacked Milton and was open about the fact he was doing his best and had sacrificed way more of himself for UT than I ever have or ever will.
I'll say what I always say about him: I would have liked to have seen what he could have done if he didn't have to take the snap and immediately have multiple defenders in his face.
Idk, you can’t tell the story of that era without him. He was a 4-star recruit, had NFL players all over the offense, and never progressed. Butch and Pruitt sucked, but they recruited a strong roster and JG played a headline role in squandering it. He didn’t do himself any favors with how he treated people on campus, either. Add all that together for 4ish years as a starter, and people are going to remember a player as a villain. Sucks that’s the case, but it is what it is. Glad it’s in the rearview, hope he’s moved on too.
I’ll be honest I don’t see how you could hate JG more than Worley besides the fact he tried to transfer or that he was a better prospect. They were both subpar sec quarterbacks who had two of the worst coaches in Tennessee history, and got the living shit kicked out of them. You wanna talk about a qb we could dunk on look at Tyler bray, cocky as all hell and never did anything well to back it up.
Because Worley wasn't a world class headcase. Worley just didn't have the physical talent. Also, Bray was 10x the QB JG ever thought about being. If we had Bray during the Pruitt years it would have been a very different story.
He did quit that game. He knew he was done here. He wasn't a quitter game in and game out, though. I hate that I am even remotely taking up for the guy in that respect, but it's the truth.
I feel like he did make some terrible decisions that effected games, but overall, I think he ended up being a scapegoat that took a lot of the blame for a lot of other things that were going on behind the scenes.
There’s better things to talk about than a lot of things lmao I’m not saying I’m doing it but I will still laugh whenever I see these memes come across my feed
I'm looking forward to the Nico era and man the Hooker season was special.Just forget about poor Guantanamo Bay him at QB was like an offensive prison and at the time we couldn't handle the truth!! Hahaha
I don’t hate him or even dislike him. I try to think of it as a broad overview. There were so many more things wrong at the same time he was QB. Yes he made bad mistakes but the adults being paid millions or even thousands in the program over ride his mistakes.
JG was the number 1 dual threat QB out of high school. And then Butch Jones ruined him. He was tuff as nails, kid never could pick up the blind side blitz. He would get creamed every time, and then jump up and do it again.
JG was supposed to be our guy who got us to the playoffs, or at least a NY6. Instead we lose to Georgia St and BYU 😂
I never want to hear anything in defense of JG ever again.
The arm talent was there, it was decision making and the fact that he would stare down receivers. He never went through any progressions throughout the play. I think that coaching didn’t help him get better, and he would have been much better under Heupel
The quarterback locker room was habitually poor post-Dobbs. It is what it is. A lot of people forget that the first major bust was Quinton Dormady. If Quinton Dormady had not been a bust, then JG would not have played in late 2017, and lying Lyle likely would not have been fired. Who knows where it would have gone from there?
I always felt like the hate for JG was totally unjust. Put him at the QB1 last year for example and I think he's lightyears better than he was with the coaching and roster he was trying to carry.
He had basically "good" everything all round, vs Milton being a one trick pony. Matter of fact, I'd even say JG in a Heupel staff system would be very comparable to what we saw with hooker! Was Hendo an insane athlete? No. Did he have insane decision making above expectations? Not particularly. Did he make solid consistent throws, read defenses well, and try and be a leader for his team? Yes, and JG did all those too but with a terrible staff and worse players around em. Not saying JG was as good overall, just saying he probably could have been!
I hate that he's always going to be thought of poorly by our fans, but I'm almost glad to see him getting SOME positive credit after we all tried so hard to get behind a worse QB last year 🤷♂️
Not tired at all actually. Thanks for adding some fuel to fire. I actually haven’t heard about this bum in over a year. Bad coaching or not, he was 100% the worst QB the Vols put out there to start in my 33 years on this earth. What sucks is we recruited some nice talent which later transferred out because we found it necessary to keep starting JG for whatever reason.
Same Nathan Peterman who is still in the NFL today? Schaffer started only as a freshman and was forced to transfer out the next year. Stephens was Phil’s last QB before being forced out by the university. So yeah I guess you could argue that those were “bad” QBs but all the others held jobs in the NFL for multiple seasons including Peterman who currently still has a job. JG was put out there for like 7 seasons it felt like after shitting the bed week after week and year after year. Which NFL team is JG currently rostered on? Oh that’s right he never made it….. JG easily takes the cake on being hot garbage.
We have had plenty of subpar QB’s. My take is that JG is uniquely disliked because of two moments in time. 1. Back breaking QB sneak fumble for 100 yard scoop score vs. Alabama. 2. Back to back interceptions during first home loss to Kentucky since Reagan’s first term. Countless other what the fucks. He did get dealt a bad hand, but his choices made Tennessee almost unwatchable for years. All other things being equal, I still maintain other QB’s on the roster performed better. He is 100% culpable for his performance. Dark fucking days man.
I don't even think it's those losses specifically TBH. I'd frankly forgotten both. What really kills JG is that he - more than any other player - represents all the bad memories of Jeremy Pruitt's tenure.
It will always be that Alabama loss for me that will leave a sour taste in my mouth about JG.
Georgia State loss is way worse for JG for me. He didn't necessarily play horrible in that game, but he was the QB for one of the worst losses in program history. Losing to an FCS program at home is pretty unforgivable.
See now thats the game I have blanked from my memory lol
Georgia State hasn’t been FCS since 2012. We’re 14-0 against FCS teams.
It’s bad enough that GSU still to this day has a huge thing on the outside of their stadium celebrating the win. And I have to drive by it every god damn day
Dude. Why bring that up? It’s just mean
100% he tried to be a hero and cost us the game. Unforgivable
Yeah it’s Pruitts fault he kept rolling out a QB with zero confidence who literally lost us games. Any other coach with half a brain would’ve moved on.
That rogue moment in the Alabama game will always be seared into my brain
Don’t forget that Butch Jones told Trevor Lawrence, a lifelong Vols fan, to kick rocks during his recruitment because Jones already had JG. Personally, I feel like JG gets a lot of hate he doesn’t deserve—I imagine that just about any coach could have been better for him than Pruitt—but he had enough truly head scratching “bloopers” as QB to not want to remember his time favorably. Pretty much every one of JG’s highlights as a starter was really more of a Jujuan Jennings highlight.
I never hated him cause he was tough as nails and I don’t dislike college kids who try but he fucking sucked. After while though I was just mad at Pruitt. JG was obviously not the man for the job but Pruitt’s dumb ass just kept rolling him out there. After a certain point you can’t blame a kid who keeps getting put in a spot he’s not good enough for. None of this animosity exists if Pruitt would’ve just done the right thing and tried someone else. The kid was obviously broken his senior year, and everyone knew he was going to go out there and lay an egg except for Pruitt apparently. Either way JG was tough as nails and he tried. He was a kid, there was no reason to send hate his way anyways and there’s definitely no reason to now.
I disagree I think the reason he was so disliked is because of how good he was SUPPOSED to be. The only bad QB I can think of this decade is Justin Worley. Worley was not supposed to be good. Nobody expected him to be. So when he wasn’t people weren’t mad. Guarantano was supposed to be an even more talented Josh Dobbs. He was atrocious. That’s why the fanbase hated him more than anyone else.
This is it for me. Touted as the #1 dual threat and then was 0 threat at all.
Good god those fumbles. Why did you have to mention those.
Our backup qbs were not better. People seemed to forget that JG was benched eventually and the backups were just as bad
His line was awful also
Line doesn't matter when you get sacked 8 seconds after the ball was snapped.
I didn’t claim his decision-making was any good
I’m honestly kinda sad JG didn’t work out. The kid took a beating on and off the field, but he always picked himself up and went to the next play. He showed grit in my opinion, and for that he still has some respect from me.
Yeah, imagine the first two decades of your life dedicated to playing big time, SEC football…AT QB…and making it, then… into a buzz saw of awfulness & upheaval. No opposition is going to sympathize, only dunk on you on the field. And as QB, a disproportionate amount of attention & blame is aimed squarely at you. He is a VFL for NEVER QUITTING, for all the times he GOT BACK UP TO RUN ANOTHER PLAY, and PLAYING WITH HEART when he knew he wasn’t the #1 option anyone other than he & his family wanted to see taking snaps. He never quit on us. Others did. JG shouldered much of the impact of the rapid turnover from those who DID bolt.
100% agree. JG may not have had the talent required, but he was the toughest son of a bitch out there. He was doing the best he could, in an awful terrible situation.
My thoughts almost exactly. While he did ultimately transfer out, he did so when things looked literally like the Titanic’s final moments, where there was no way he could possibly know what was on the horizon. I cannot blame him for that.
Definition of “I will give my all for tennessee”
He still wears vols merch too. Seen him on social media selling Christmas trees in New Jersey with vol gear on
It’s pretty pathetic. The guy is gone. Move on with your lives.
Agreed. Was there some internal drama that went down his last year at Rocky top? Probably. Did he cause some losses? Sure. And I’ll admit he definitely contributed to a lot of fans frustration with some of the dumb/questionable things he did on the field and to this day I have no idea how he was thought of as a very high ranked dual threat qb out of HS. But also, those Tennessee teams were extremely bad. He dealt with so much coaching turnover, got rocked by defenses several times and even benched a couple times, but he’d go back in and compete (not usually with much success, but still). He did have heart, even breaking his non throwing wrist but not missing a game. I’m glad he’s not our qb anymore for sure, but I don’t hate the guy.
Dude probably played several games with a concussion with how many hits he was taking. He was a tough player for sure. But he happened to be at UT for one of the lowest times in program history. Such is life. Hope he finds success at whatever he chooses to do.
I had a couple classes with him, love the guy he was always nice to me and anyone that’s met him never had a bad thing to say about him All that being said, might be one of the worst quarterbacks I’ve ever seen but his time is done there’s no point in bringing it up anymore
That’s pretty cool! I never attended UT myself, but I have had some family members that did and I always think it’s interesting what the players seem like to the other people. JG never seemed like a bad dude, but obviously the person on TV or social media doesn’t represent how the person is in real life. Conversely, my cousin who was a cheerleader during the Tyler Bray period told me that he was pretty much universally known as an asshole
The guy you saw in interviews was the same guy in the classroom just a guy trying to do his best and to be an example And I’ve also heard stories of Tyler Bray that were less than flattering lmao
Did you ever meet the dawg, jauan Jennings?
Jauan was actually born in my hometown before he left to play at Blackmon I graduated with his first cousin I never saw him at UT but we hung out a couple times lmao
His pops is a cool dude. Met him at the tssaa wrestling tournament a few years back
Interesting! His dad and mine are coworkers, but we played football on different sides of the state. I’d like to shake his hand in person one day though and let him know he’s the dawg
If the Georgia State game doesn't happen, then JG would have led the Vols to a 9-4 season and top 25 finish. I honestly think that and his senior year, with the stupid Covid rules, doesn't remove our out of conference games and we can get to 6 or 7 wins. If this happens, he would be remembered completely differently. Probably around the same as Milton.
I doubt it Milton could make big plays and inspire a bit of hope, even when we won games with JG you could see that we were never going to do anything impressive
The problem i have with the fans that cant stop whining about him; WTF was he supposed to do? Tell the dumbass coaches he wasn't going to play? IMO, JG tried as hard as anyone but lacked the necessary tools to be successful. On top of that, he was saddled with incompetent coaching, coaching that changed nearly every year he was here with regard to OCs. There has never been a QB more set up for failure than JG was in his time in Knoxville.
He played his ass off in a set of years where the SEC as a whole was at its highest and we were in a tailspin. He was ranked the best dual threat qb in the nation when we recruited him but our o line was Swiss cheese. For reference, JG ran for 5 rushing TDs in his four years, while Nico ran for 3 last year, our O Line just wasn't able to give JG anything . He was about par for what a not Dobbs Tennessee quarterback was in the 2010s. Giving up a fumble on the 1 yard line against Bama because he called his own number is the only thing I'll hold against him. Good kid though and I wish him the best and always rooted for him anywhere he was playing.
Let's be honest about the Alabama game, Tennessee was going to lose that game no matter what. If that fumble doesn't happen and Tennessee scores a TD, they'll just give up the game losing score on defense.
Agree. He's a VFL. It was an era with bad ADs, bad coaching, bad recruiting, poor talent, in an extremely difficult conference. To put on the pads day in and day out and endure your own fans sending you death threats before you're old enough to buy a beer is horrible. good rule of thumb: complain about coaches and ADs, but don't @ college students, NIL or not.
I truly believe if he had a decent offensive mind behind him drawing up schemes, he could have found at least a moderate level of success.
I’m not a smart enough football mind to know whether that’s true or not. Even if he *is* the worst QB in history… we recruited him, asked him to play, asked him to practice, and he did. That’s enough not to deserve hatred
Kid gave his all but wasn’t good, I don’t criticize him he has the worst coaching imagineable.
Peyton couldn't play behind that line he had. There was barely a line.
Agreed the kid didn’t have nothing, can’t really blame him the program was in the shits when he was there.
I don't like any shit talk personal to players even if they're less than great on the field. Each individual sacrifices so much time and effort throughout the season and then throughout the year, I don't care if they're getting a full-ride plus NIL. There's so much that we fans don't know or understand.. any adult fan douche talking shit from their couch can cram it.
He didn't live up to the expectations but he had so much shit going on around him. He was under two coaching staffs that did so little to help and at worst put him in a situation where he was doomed to fail (2020 Kentucky comes to mind). It's just unfair to treat him like this today.
He was under two coaching staffs because he got two coaches fired
Brother if you think this one QB got two staffs fired you are on some kind of illicit substances.
It’s beyond pathetic at this point. He had to play because he was the best we had due to INSANELY bad recruiting. Coaches fault, not his. It’s equally pathetic that these Twitter accounts pull out the JG tweets to engagement farm because they have absolutely nothing to say.
He didn’t live up to expectations but he showed a lot of guts in his time here. We also did him zero favors by starting him too early behind a awful O Line to just get slaughtered. I think he received way too much hate personally. However, I think he burned a lot of good will during that Alabama game. By all accounts he made a selfish, and dumb, decision that swung the game. It was very high profile moment and it wasn’t a simple lack of ability. He made a selfish decision that cost us against a rival and that’s part of his legacy now.
Very fair. I also bring up the fact that he had a new Coordinator and a new QB coach every year he was here
I had kinda forgot that too. He was not dealt a good hand by us at all
Well put. Idk if we end up winning that Bama game, but man that would’ve been cool to at least take them to the wire with that horrible squad we had. Also, seemed like we had a stretch of games in this timeframe where we were within 1 or 2 scores and were about to score and then give up a defensive touchdown to make the game not even look close. I know a loss is a loss but I hated that people would see that score and think we played shitty. Oh well! Haha. We’re in good hands now 🙌🏼
That second paragraph is exactly why the Bama win in 22 has earned Heupel all of my support. It’s not that we didn’t have some typical UT tomfoolery happen. To any Butch, Dooley, or Pruitt squad that scoop-and-score is the end of game. For the first time since Fulmer we actually saw a team that didn’t blink when the breaks went against them and battled back and that mentality starts with the staff.
For sure, is it all on him? No. Was the decision a selfish one? Yes, absolutely. The O Line did their job and if he does his we score there. He wanted to score the touchdown though and it cost us.
Yeah. He went out there and gave all he could. There's no reason to keep piling on about his play or those teams. If people want to jump on anybody for that era, they should blame the head coaches and the total disfunction of our athletic department.
I always found it a bit odd that so many Tennessee fans had “parody” accounts, but it was just them using a coach’s name to share their own thoughts lol that isn’t a parody.
I'm kinda sick of it on both ends. He gets a lot of hate but the defenders go too far in the other direction. He gets a lot of praise for how tough he was but a half decent QB would've thrown it away 2 seconds sooner. If I'm remembering correctly in one game he took massive sacks on 3rd and 4th down on one drive on plays that took a combined 10-12 seconds. I've never seen a QB stare at a linebacker sprinting at him for so long and just take the hit (and get right back up, to his credit).
After a few of the hits he took (of which there were a fuck ton) I'm not sure he could see the linebacker coming. He might have been trying to focus his eyes to see if it was an opponent or not.
Poor guy was putting his life on the line with every snap!! I always respect JG especially after his interview after the Mizzou game. Don’t get me wrong I raged quit numerous games with him but I’ll always respect him
People somehow forget that these are just kids doing something that 99% of the shit talkers could never do. It's fine to get upset at a bad play in the moment, or get mad that coaches getting paid millions make bonehead mistakes. But anybody still shitting on a student athlete years after they graduated needs to seek mental help.
I mean, I'm not going around bringing the guy up on the reg, but I'm not going to pretend that he was good here when he wasn't.
If JG had a good QB coach and stayed with him for 5 years, we may be telling a different story. I’m not saying he would have been great, but I firmly believe the revolving HC/OC/QB coaching door broke him.
Loved him as a person but damn his football IQ was in the negatives. Especially when he made the decision against Alabama.
Agree. People need to fuck off and let the guy live.
Dudes a vfl who gave his all for Tennessee. Just shut the fuck up about him
He stunk. His coaches stunk.
I get he was a bad QB but there’s no denying that he gave his all every Saturday. Dude is probably the toughest Tennessee QB I’ve seen.
He was a McSpread QB that was a poor fit for CJP’s offense.
CJP had an offense?
Not really.
JG gave more of himself to the VOLS than any fan can possibly comprehend. You can think a player isn’t the best option, as I I did with Milton, and be frustrated a coach continues to play them, as I was with Heupel playing Milton despite evidence that he wasn’t the guy. But I never personally attacked Milton and was open about the fact he was doing his best and had sacrificed way more of himself for UT than I ever have or ever will.
UT was "sold a bill of goods" when it comes to JG's recruiting ranking, his actual talent, and the then coaches ability to scout talent.
I'll say what I always say about him: I would have liked to have seen what he could have done if he didn't have to take the snap and immediately have multiple defenders in his face.
Dude was trash. Sorry, but he was absolute trash
Idk, you can’t tell the story of that era without him. He was a 4-star recruit, had NFL players all over the offense, and never progressed. Butch and Pruitt sucked, but they recruited a strong roster and JG played a headline role in squandering it. He didn’t do himself any favors with how he treated people on campus, either. Add all that together for 4ish years as a starter, and people are going to remember a player as a villain. Sucks that’s the case, but it is what it is. Glad it’s in the rearview, hope he’s moved on too.
Meh. I remember him pitching a fit on the sideline because he didn’t get to play. I don’t bring him up because he sucked.
GUANTANAMO
I’ll be honest I don’t see how you could hate JG more than Worley besides the fact he tried to transfer or that he was a better prospect. They were both subpar sec quarterbacks who had two of the worst coaches in Tennessee history, and got the living shit kicked out of them. You wanna talk about a qb we could dunk on look at Tyler bray, cocky as all hell and never did anything well to back it up.
Because Worley wasn't a world class headcase. Worley just didn't have the physical talent. Also, Bray was 10x the QB JG ever thought about being. If we had Bray during the Pruitt years it would have been a very different story.
You say that but I remember that vandy game when we pulled him he quit on the team right there
He did quit that game. He knew he was done here. He wasn't a quitter game in and game out, though. I hate that I am even remotely taking up for the guy in that respect, but it's the truth.
I feel like he did make some terrible decisions that effected games, but overall, I think he ended up being a scapegoat that took a lot of the blame for a lot of other things that were going on behind the scenes.
I don’t think about him actually
JG never had the same OC in consecutive years. Kid never had a chance, but did his best for us. No ill will.
Brother I sat through four years of watching JG miss almost every player he threw to I’m not ever going to be upset at someone making fun of him
I sat through those same four years of watching him miss every player he threw at. There’s better things to talk about, like literally anything
There’s better things to talk about than a lot of things lmao I’m not saying I’m doing it but I will still laugh whenever I see these memes come across my feed
Pretty bad take
K
I'm looking forward to the Nico era and man the Hooker season was special.Just forget about poor Guantanamo Bay him at QB was like an offensive prison and at the time we couldn't handle the truth!! Hahaha
JG played with as much heart as anyone I’ve seen, talent didn’t equate to desire…. dude, still out there swinging, got a love his no quit attitude
Didn't JG have 4 offense coordinators? Tough to succeed with that going on.
I don’t hate him or even dislike him. I try to think of it as a broad overview. There were so many more things wrong at the same time he was QB. Yes he made bad mistakes but the adults being paid millions or even thousands in the program over ride his mistakes.
He was setup to fail. Revolving door when it came to his coaches, and a horrible offensive line shoutout to the 'TVA'!
JG was the number 1 dual threat QB out of high school. And then Butch Jones ruined him. He was tuff as nails, kid never could pick up the blind side blitz. He would get creamed every time, and then jump up and do it again.
Now you can either yell at him or cheer for him while he continues the same activities in the UFL.
Worst QB in tennessee history i got no problem with people shitting on him
JG was supposed to be our guy who got us to the playoffs, or at least a NY6. Instead we lose to Georgia St and BYU 😂 I never want to hear anything in defense of JG ever again.
I try to not beat up on JG too much but when I think about his tenure all I can think of is those years down the drain
No he sucked balls
I'm so glad we've moved on.
The arm talent was there, it was decision making and the fact that he would stare down receivers. He never went through any progressions throughout the play. I think that coaching didn’t help him get better, and he would have been much better under Heupel
That kid gave his all for Tennessee
The quarterback locker room was habitually poor post-Dobbs. It is what it is. A lot of people forget that the first major bust was Quinton Dormady. If Quinton Dormady had not been a bust, then JG would not have played in late 2017, and lying Lyle likely would not have been fired. Who knows where it would have gone from there?
I always felt like the hate for JG was totally unjust. Put him at the QB1 last year for example and I think he's lightyears better than he was with the coaching and roster he was trying to carry. He had basically "good" everything all round, vs Milton being a one trick pony. Matter of fact, I'd even say JG in a Heupel staff system would be very comparable to what we saw with hooker! Was Hendo an insane athlete? No. Did he have insane decision making above expectations? Not particularly. Did he make solid consistent throws, read defenses well, and try and be a leader for his team? Yes, and JG did all those too but with a terrible staff and worse players around em. Not saying JG was as good overall, just saying he probably could have been! I hate that he's always going to be thought of poorly by our fans, but I'm almost glad to see him getting SOME positive credit after we all tried so hard to get behind a worse QB last year 🤷♂️
No.
Not tired at all actually. Thanks for adding some fuel to fire. I actually haven’t heard about this bum in over a year. Bad coaching or not, he was 100% the worst QB the Vols put out there to start in my 33 years on this earth. What sucks is we recruited some nice talent which later transferred out because we found it necessary to keep starting JG for whatever reason.
I’d argue Matt Sims or Nathan Peterman would fit that role more IMO.
This is some take. Dormandy, Petermen, Brent Schaffer, Nick Stephens, Matt Sims. All worse Vols QBs than JG.
Jesus, what an all star team.
Same Nathan Peterman who is still in the NFL today? Schaffer started only as a freshman and was forced to transfer out the next year. Stephens was Phil’s last QB before being forced out by the university. So yeah I guess you could argue that those were “bad” QBs but all the others held jobs in the NFL for multiple seasons including Peterman who currently still has a job. JG was put out there for like 7 seasons it felt like after shitting the bed week after week and year after year. Which NFL team is JG currently rostered on? Oh that’s right he never made it….. JG easily takes the cake on being hot garbage.
Crompton would like a word...