DALLAS — Josh Heupel isn’t one for showmanship or hype. Instead of his highly-touted quarterback Nico Iamaleava and potential No. 1 DE James Pearce, the Tennessee coach brought a senior offensive lineman and linebacker to SEC Media Days.
Entering his fourth season, perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay to Heupel is that he’s made Tennessee… boring?
“When I took this job three years ago, everybody can go back and kind of research what we were embarked on as far as challenges and how we had to navigate those,” Heupel said. “We’re at the point now where we’re almost free and clear of navigating all those things. Our roster is the deepest that it’s been by far.”
With years of calm, it’s easy to forget the decade of turmoil Tennessee football once endured. The program fired previous coach Jeremy Pruitt amid alleged Level I NCAA violations. Numerous coaches turned the Vols job down after they fired Pruitt’s predecessor Butch Jones. Lane Kiffin abandoned the program after one year. Those messes ended not only with new football coaches but with new athletic directors, too.
Heupel was seen by many as a bridge coach after joining his UCF athletic director Danny White in the move to Tennessee. Already, he’s well overperformed expectations. In 2022, the Vols beat Alabama and won 11 games. Perhaps most impressive, he followed it up with another nine-win campaign, giving Tennessee its most consistent two-year run since 2004.
It comes through in interviews that Heupel is a quiet guy. He has seen the highs and lows of college football, from quarterbacking Oklahoma’s 2000 championship team to getting run off from his alma mater as an offensive coordinator in 2014. But more than anything, that calm consistency stands out to his…
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