Depending who you ask, there are plenty of prime suspects for Tennessee’s falloff offensively last season.
How about quarterback Joe Milton? He wasn’t as accurate as that Hendon Hooker guy.
How about the receivers? They weren’t nearly as good as the 2022 crew led by Jalin Hyatt.
Heck, even superstar center Cooper Mays was hurt for the first month of the season.
Then, there’s offensive coordinator Joe Halzle. Fair or not, some fingers point at him. While the Vols certainly run head coach Josh Heupel’s offense, timing isn’t on Halzle’s side.
Tennessee was running wide-open in 2022 with offensive coordinator Alex Golesh running the show. Now, he’s the head coach at South Florida. That leaves Halzle, 38, in charge of the Vols’ vaunted offense. But we all know that Heupel calls the shots. However, it would be nice to know that a coordinator is bringing new, fresh ideas to the table – at the very least. This season is Halzle’s chance to prove he can do that, especially with redshirt freshman phenom quarterback Nico Iamaleava ready to take hold.
“I guess we’ll kind of find out this season,” Halzle said of the challenge of replacing Milton with Iamaleava. “For everything you think you know about a guy, until they have become the guy for an extended period of time, and they have one week to learn an install and go, you don’t really know them.
“I’m really excited about what he brings to the table. Joe had his own skillset, and we catered to that. Nico has his own, and we’re going to cater to that. Whatever that ends up looking like as we get rolling is going to be fun to watch. Really excited about what he can bring to the table this fall.”
While there’s reason to be excited about what Iamaleava did in a 35-0 whipping of Iowa in the Citrus Bowl, he was still a back-up. Iamaleava had yet to be asked to master the entire offense.
“That’s always the thing when you have a freshman coming in like he was last year,” Halzle said. “Understanding that he was in that two-spot, it’s like how do we give this guy enough to go play well, but not absolutely burden him to the point where he’s not playing fast or showing off his athleticism?
“He got that version of the offense last year and excelled at it in a high way. Just watching that kid in the spring scrimmages after he’d been here for two months and it’s like ‘Man this guy just gets it on the football side of the ball.’ Now, getting to take this whole offseason and really dive into the intricacies of understanding why are we calling certain things in certain situations.
“Why are we doing things a certain way? Why are we switching our protection? He is blossoming in that. I think we are going to see his play go to an even higher level, which is a scary thing to think about because just his natural ability to step on a football field and go play well is elite. Now, he’s got to go do it with live bullets for 17 straight games this year, but we’re really excited about where he’s at mentally in this process.”
Notice Halzle said “17” games this season. That would put the Vols in the National Championship Game. As good as Iamaleava was against the Hawkeyes, he’ll need to be even better than that if the Vols hope to advance deep into the College Football Playoff. He seems intent on doing that.
“My favorite thing is, for all the accolades that he got after that game, he wins the MVP. He came out of it like, ‘Man, I left so much on the field,’” Halzle said of Iamaleava. “When you have a guy like that, that is fun to coach because you don’t have to worry about trying to keep a guy humble. That is just who he is. He came in as soon as the team came back, and was like, ‘Okay, I want to watch it. How do I get better? How do I do this?’
“He has been working with our assistant coaches, as far as understanding what calls are the centers making on these runs versus these looks versus these fronts, so I can put my eyes in the right spot to be able to make my RPO game what it needs to be. He has absolutely attacked the knowledge side of this, which is not something that we force him to do. That is why it is really exciting moving forward, that he has that kind of appetite for wanting to learn what this game is.”
Like Iamaleava, Tennessee fans couldn’t be hungrier to see the offense they saw in 2022. Last season’s course lacked something.
