He may have drawn attention to himself by dancing in the locker room Saturday night after Tennessee football beat the Pittsburgh Panthers on the road 34-27 in overtime. However, Josh Heupel wasn’t celebrating Monday.
Beating a top 25 team on the road is always going to make you happy in the moment. Presumably after a day to look at film, though, Heupel couldn’t let go of the miscues that took place in the first quarter and second half.
“There are things we can control, that we can be better (at),” Heupel said in his Monday press conference. “Offensively, the way we started, really in all three phases of the football game, the way we started, the third quarter, just offensively and special teams, we need to be more dialed in—that’s coaches and players together.”
That focus on the criticism actually began during The Josh Heupel Show on Sunday. At one point, he was given the numbers from his offensive players.
Hendon Hooker had 325 yards passing, Cedric Tillman had 162 yards receiving, and Jalin Hyatt had 11 catches for 73 yards. The Vols’ head coach said on his show those numbers can all be better.
“There’s so much that we can be cleaner,” he said. “I just think the third quarter was a wash for us offensively. There were so many opportunities there.”
Listening to Heupel speak, though, it wasn’t just the miscues that stood out. He clearly tied that to the week leading up to the game.
Heupel implied Tennessee football didn’t have a good week of practice. He specifically said at one point that he didn’t think a couple of the practices last week were their best.
“It showed up in the way that we played at times during the course of the football game,” he said of the practices. “Our preparation has to be consistent, your process of how you approach and get to game day is what takes you to game day to play your best football.”
For a coach who has mastered the art of saying a lot while revealing nothing, that was a very revealing quote. How could a veteran team not practice well leading up to a road game against a ranked team that beat them last year?
What’s clear is that after having time to think about the game and perhaps watch the film, Heupel couldn’t get past the mistakes. This is very different from his postgame press conference, when he mostly praised the defense.
Is this a concerning sign for the Vols going forward? Well, Heupel at least didn’t seem to imply that. In fact, even on Monday, he pointed to the good signs from the game.
“I think it is great that we came out on top in this football game, and we experienced some of those things during the course of the game that can help us as we go through this season,” he said. “That’s individually for Hendon, it’s for any of our wideouts, it’s for us as an offensive unit, our entire football team continuing to compete and find a way to make a play at the end.”
Miscues in the game included a blocked punt, a fumble by Jaylen Wright and a muffed punt return by Trevon Flowers all in the second half. They also had multiple drives killed due to penalties.
Drops and overthrows plagued the Vols in the first quarter. That’s why they fell behind 10-0. Hooker had multiple misses, and Tillman had multiple drops.
Heupel noted that the team is much-better equipped to handle adversity than they were last year. Still, as Tennessee football prepares for the Akron Zips, those miscues won’t be ignored.
“The challenge every week is really us, and we talk about that every week,” he said. “We talked about it (Monday) morning too. Our players have to buy into it.”
Maybe it’s cliche, but it seems like Heupel is doing a better job than previous coaches of addressing his team’s flaws. That could be why Heupel, as Dave Hooker wrote, is making history with Tennessee football.
