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KNOXVILLE -- Tennessee defensive coordinator John Chavis wants to take an even approach to each week's gridiron matchup, with an emphasis on having his players make steady progress and become more consistent.

The Vols began last season with a rookie secondary in a defense that gave up 59 points to Florida in Gainesville and closed out the year by allowing only 17 points in a 21-17 bowl victory over Wisconsin.

"To be consistent and improve week-to-week," Chavis said Tuesday. "With a couple of exceptions, we did that last year.

"At the end of the season, we were playing as well as most defenses in the country."

Well, kind of.

In the final game of the regular season, Kentucky hung 50 points on UT in a five-overtime thriller at Lexington. The week prior, Vanderbilt scored 24 and lost by one point at Neyland Stadium.

In other instances, you might argue the Tennessee offense was the weak link, failing to reach offensive coordinator David Cutcliffe's magic number of 30 points a game, namely against South Carolina and LSU in the SEC title game.

Dave Clawson's new offense has certainly not helped Chavis' defense so far this season, cracking the 30-point ceiling only once and scoring just nine touchdowns in five games, with only one TD against each SEC opponent -- Florida and Auburn. That's so little point production that a coaching job at Duke might seem like advancement.

Unfazed by the pressure being brought to bear on his defense, Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer detoured around Chavis' desire to avoid putting so much emphasis on a single game by calling Saturday's contest with Georgia "huge" and "easily the biggest challenge of the year" for the defensive front.

Time for Chavis' unit to leap into November mode, Fulmer seems to be saying, because the offense is still searching for its "personality."

Although most observers complain that personality has been rather too obvious for a decade, the Vols move on to Athens this weekend to face a Georgia squad that has had two weeks to think about how its season started with a No. 1 ranking and eroded quickly toward the shellacking it received on its home turf from Alabama.

Add to that the pummeling the then-No. 12 Bulldogs took from the unranked Vols last season at Neyland Stadium, and it's hard to imagine that a football team could require more motivation or that a coach -- in this case Mark Richt -- could have more to lose (in regards to reputation) if the Bulldogs do not win this game.

Georgia comes into the game tops in the SEC in pass efficiency, passing offense and total offense; second in third-down conversions and third in scoring offense. Tennessee isn't even close to the middle of the pack by comparison.

So Chavis and Fulmer may diverge on how they want to assess the importance of this game publicly, but the fact is it's all on the defense this week while the offense takes another Rorschach test.

Leonard Butts is sports editor. Write to him at The Daily Times, P.O. Box 9740, Maryville, TN 37802, or e-mail him at leonard.butts@thedailytimes.com