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 team chemistry, that the offseason workout 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.
Coaches at every football program in the nation love to extol the virtues of their program, what it has accomplished in the offseason, how well everyone is getting along and how excited the entire team is to start running at each other at full speed in the midst of a sizzling summer practice. The talk track is the same 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 no scuttlebutt 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 rumbles of Tennessee’s improvement slowing. Those rumbles were heard early in the previous four coaches’ tenures at Tennessee, but Heupel has avoided any early bumps in the road, except for the one he couldn’t control.
The NCAA’s investigation becoming national news with a notice of allegations public surely didn’t help the Vols, but Heupel handled it deftly and made sure all of his current commitment ands preferred prospects knew what was coming and what to expect.
The scuttlebutt involving former Tennessee coaches was much more salacious than Heupel, who looks like he’d rather take a hot bath instead of hitting a hot club. Something tells me Heupel won’t follow in Urban Meyer’s footsteps and open his own nightclub. That was a bad idea. 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 on the dry wall right outside his office. Therefore, he took over the patch work duty and told the previous wall man that he could take a 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 so offended one of his players that his father, who 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 former Kentucky coach Hal Mumme. There’s a big difference between throwing the ball deep few times too often and going for it on fourth down in the shadow of your own goalpost.
