It doesn’t matter when or where a coach is hired. Everybody is going to ask how long they should have to rebuild the program. When Tennessee hired Josh Heupel in 2021, the world knew his rebuilding process would probably take longer than your average elite coach needs when taking over a blue blood program.
Four years later, though, how long is enough?
Barely two weeks removed from the Vols’ disappointing 42-17 College Football Playoff blowout loss to the Ohio State Buckeyes to end their season, Paul Finebaum, the Mouth of the South himself, referred to Tennessee as on the cusp of elite. When will they stop just knocking on the door, though?
Tennessee, by Vegas standards, hit par this year. They were underdogs in three games and lost three games. Of course, one of those games in which they were underdogs was against the Alabama Crimson Tide, their best win and a team that happened to be massively overrated.
Taking that into account and the fact that they were upset by the Arkansas Razorbacks and failed to cover the spread in their other two losses, to the Georgia Bulldogs and OSU, you could easily say they underachieved. After all, Bama is the only team they beat this year that will finish in the top 25.
Even more disturbing is the offensive drop-off. Heupel was hired as an offensive mind, and against elite competition, Tennessee’s offense with Joe Milton III and then Nico Iamaleava over the past two years hasn’t come close to what it was with Hendon Hooker in 2021 and 2022.
If the Vols are on the cusp of elite, why are they showing regression in what is supposed to be Heupel’s strength? Don’t give me 71 points against the Kent State Golden Flashes or their overall averages. They are inflating their season stats against extremely weak competition.
Now, you can make a lot of excuses for what happened this year. The receivers never got fully healthy, there were injuries at tackle, Iamaleava was in his first year starting and defenses were throwing new looks to stop this offense. All of that is fair.
Who’s to say other cracks won’t hit the team next year, though? This is football, and you have to adjust to things like that. The 1998 team didn’t wilt when Jamal Lewis went down with a season-ending injury, and having a banged up tackle here or a slowed receiver there can’t derail all of your goals.
Yes, NIL and the transfer portal will never allow for the type of depth the ’98 team had again, but it shouldn’t mean that those wrenches reveal your team to be multiple tiers below the top tier still. Shouldn’t Tennessee have arrived by now?
Maybe they will, but then what’s the next step? They had the quarterback, Heupel’s hand-picked receivers and a much more competent defense in 2024. If there are limitations to the depth you can build in this era, how much more do they need? Is it even possible for them to get there?
All of these questions have to be raised as Heupel begins working on his fifth year in Knoxville. No, this isn’t a call to put him on the hot seat. That would be ridiculous. At the same time, it’s reasonable to ask what specifically needs to happen for Tennessee to no longer just be on the cusp of elite.
