It would be refreshing to hear something a bit outside the norm when it comes to preseason football camp.
Imagine if a coach said his team was really struggling with chemistry, that the offseason workout program didn’t go nearly as well as planned and his team just isn’t prepared for the upcoming season. That’s not going to happen, but it would be entertaining if it did.
John Adams of The Knoxville News Sentinel wholeheartedly agreed:
Coaches at every football program in the nation love to extol the virtues of their program in preseason, what they have accomplished in the offseason, how well everyone is getting along and how excited the entire team is to start running at each other full speed in the midst of a sizzling summer practice. The talk track is the same from year to year and program to program.
However, this Tennessee team under second-year coach Josh Heupel seems a bit different. For some insight, there has been zero talk on the street that Heupel overly fancies young ladies, that he may be sociopathic or that he just might not be very smart. The same couldn’t be said for Heupel’s predecessors.
No, there’s not even the slightest rumbles of Tennessee going in the wrong direction. Those early rumbles turned into earthquakes in the previous four coaches’ tenures at Tennessee. Unlike those guys, Heupel has avoided some early bumps in the road, except for the one he couldn’t control.
The NCAA’s investigation becoming public surely didn’t help the Vols, but Heupel handled it deftly and made sure all of his current commitments and preferred prospects knew what was coming and what to expect.
The rumors involving former Tennessee coaches was much more salacious before Heupel, who looks like he’d rather take a warm bath than hit a hot club. Something tells me that Heupel won’t be opening a club like former Ohio State and Florida coach Urban Meyer. However, if Heupel decides to venture into the hospitality realm, it’s hard to imagine him skeazing on some lady that isn’t his wife. He’ll leave that to Meyer and a certain coach in the SEC West.
My favorite story from Tennessee coaches-gone-by happened early in this coach’s career in Knoxville. No, I won’t name him, but this coach didn’t like the spackling job being done right outside his office. Therefore, he took over the patch work duty and told the previous wall man that he could take a long break. So much for delegation.
There are other coaches from Tennessee’s recent past that didn’t have a great reputation behind the scenes. One supposedly got into a physical confrontation with a player during practice. That same coach had so offended one of his players that the player’s father, who along with his son was deeply religious, called me to voice concern that his son might lose his temper because he wasn’t used to being called names and spoken to like a stray dog.
Then, there was the guy that Tennessee had to hire because the administration couldn’t come to a consensus. Let’s just say that it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t a big fan of recruiting rules. We’ve begun to hear more about that recently.
So what might be Heupel’s Achilles heel? Being too aggressive on offense seems to be the only possibility, but he hasn’t led anyone to believe that will be the case. Heupel’s offense is innovative. It’s not gimmicky like Hal Mumme’s was at Kentucky although they both are known for stacking up points. There’s a big difference between throwing the ball deep too often and going for it on fourth down in the shadow of your own goalpost.
Heupel is driven by offense. This season, we’ll see if he’s more rounded. So far, that seems to be the case. The Vols ranked No. 3 in rushing offense last season. Somewhere, Mumme is shuddering at the mere thought of having that many rushing yards.
