The Tennessee Vols are winning with a fairly simple formula this season.

Run the ball, play lights-out defense, and wear the opponent down.

That formula worked to perfection on Saturday in Tennessee’s 34-6 win over Kentucky.

The Vols led just 10-6 at halftime, but they put the game away in the fourth quarter by outscoring the Wildcats 21-0.

Anyone who watched the game probably noticed that Tennessee simply pushed Kentucky around in the fourth quarter. The Vols shed blocks, they won one-on-one matchups, and they made life hell for the Kentucky offense.

“They wore them down,” said Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe of Tennessee’s win over Kentucky on Nightcap after the game.

Kentucky head coach Will Stein basically admitted after the game that Kentucky ran out of gas in the fourth quarter.

“I think we just — we gave them really short fields towards the end,” said Stein. “We started to kind of wind down a little bit. We fought, but they ended up kind of leaning on us there in the second half.”

One of Tennessee’s biggest issues last season was wearing down in the second half and letting games slip away.

Improving in that area was a point of emphasis for the Vols coming into the 2026 season — it’s why Josh Heupel hired strength coach Derek Owings away from Indiana immediately after the Hoosiers won the national championship.

“I think our fuel tank needed to be longer,” said Vols offensive line coach Glen Elarbee in August. “We weren’t unbelievable the first six games, but I thought we were solid and I just thought we wilted that last half. We just couldn’t sustain and that’s been the emphasis. Every day you walk off the practice field you want to be at the point where they almost have to carry you off. We’re trying to build our gas tank. DO (Derek Owings) has done a great job with his part of it and now it’s us just dripping ourselves every single day so that when we get halfway through the season, it’s nothing, we can go finish and hammer the way we need to.”

The Derek Owings effect is absolutely showing up this season for Tennessee. And it’s really showing up as the Vols hit the stretch run.

Everybody in the SEC is banged up at this point in the season. A big part of who excels in November will be based on who is in the best physical shape. And that might be Tennessee. I mean, the Vols looked like they got stronger as the game went on against Kentucky. And the Wildcats went the opposite direction.

Tennessee’s next three opponents — Texas A&M, LSU, and Vanderbilt — have gone through the same SEC gauntlet as the Vols. Right now, though, Tennessee might be in the best shape of any of those three teams. And that could determine the outcome of those three games.

You’ve gotta give Heupel a lot of credit. He saw that Tennessee had a big issue it needed to fix to take the next step, and he found a way to fix it in one offseason.