Tennessee Fans Can Breathe Again
Josh Heupel and his staff have stayed hot on the recruiting trail this summer, but there are more reasons to feel good about where the Vols are headed in 2022 and beyond.
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In an episode of “The Wire” on HBO, Slim Charles leans over to tell Bodie something that absolutely pertains to the state of Tennessee football in 2022, “Yeah, now, well, the thing about the old days, they the old days,” the former tells the latter. How things worked on the streets of Baltimore switched up in a hurry. Marlo Stanfield was not Avon Barksdale and the Baltimore Bodie thought he knew and understood was a thing of the past. It can be hard to cast aside what was for what is. The older we get, the more resistant we all become to change.
For Tennessee football fans, the rollercoaster of a ride that it has been on Rocky Top after Phillip Fulmer stopped roaming the sidelines has changed how a lot of those fans see the program. Fans were spoiled throughout the majority of the Fulmer run in Knoxville. Fulmer was 152-52 as the head coach at Tenneseee. He won the East six times. He brought in Peyton Manning. He won a National Championship in ‘98. The success Fulmer had for so many years made it that much harder for so many Tennessee fans to fight through in the years since.
Fans expected those results of the ‘90s to be the norm for years to come. Other fans in the SEC, though, reminded Tennessee fans of that old quote from Slim Charles. “The thing about the old days is they the old days.” With Georgia winning the National Championship in 2021-22, Bulldog fans can relish in issuing this reminder to Tennessee fans in regards to ‘98. Tennessee has not been who they were in the ‘90s in quite a long time.
This is where fandom gets tricky. When you run through as many coaches and athletic directors as Tennessee has in recent years, it’s easy to become jaded about the state of affairs on Rocky Top if you’re a longtime supporter of Tennessee. It’s hard to keep starting over, buying into the culture-building restart with a new staff and, really, give each new administration a fair shake.
Kara Lawson spoke about this a bit in a new snippet posted on the Duke Women’s Basketball Twitter page a few days ago. Her message was to embrace that things are hard and they are only going to get harder. That is what athletic director Danny White and head football coach Josh Heupel have done since arriving at Tennessee – they’ve embraced the hard.
We don’t have to rehash what kind of mess Heupel and White walked into nearly 18 months ago in Knoxville. It’s imperative to stay present. Tennessee baseball was the best team in the country in 2022. The basketball team won the SEC Tournament, and the football team was more fun than it had been since the peak of the Butch Jones era and made a bowl game in Year 1 under Heupel. Things are really good now, and they figure to stay really good across the board for the foreseeable future.
That’s scary, though.
Fans have to turn the page like Slim Charles. Look no further than the last week of recruiting on Rocky Top. Five-star edge Chandavian Bradley, four-star tackle Sham Umarov, and four-star athlete Cam Seldon are now all Tennessee commits in the 2023 class. It’s the No. 5 recruiting class in 2023 as of this writing, and with the 18 young men now in the boat, a scenario where the Vols fall out of the top-10 by National Signing Day seems rather unlikely. With 18 of the 25 slots locked in, the remaining intriguing targets include DeSean Bishop, Rico Walker and Stanton Ramil to put the finishing touches on what already is a big-time recruiting class for Huepel and his staff.
With White leading Tennessee athletics, the old days are the old days. It’s more “Rise Glorious” and less “Champions of Life” in Knoxville. Now is a time where Tennessee fans might be tempted to take this moment for granted. It was not all that long ago that folks wondered if Heupel could recruit well enough to bring Tennessee football back. Nobody doubted his offensive pedigree, they wondered about the CEO-type stuff.
To his credit, Heupel has answered the bell. He is not only producing on the field with a top-10 scoring offense out of the gate, but he is producing on the recruiting trail, too. It’s a combination of both his coaching ability and his hiring ability. Heupel deserves a lot of credit for hiring well, coaching well, and leading as a CEO well to this point.
You may not get Christian Conyer without Willie Martinez or Chandavian Bradley without Rodney Gardner or Sham Umarov without Glen Elarbee.
Tennessee fans cannot overlook how important it is that Heupel did not follow the Dan Mullen Path in Gainesville or the Bryan Harsin Path in Auburn. Instead, Tennessee fans can rejoice at snagging the No. 1 players in Kentucky and Missouri in recent weeks in the 2023 recruiting cycle. There are no questions about the culture fit for Heupel in Knoxville or if he’ll recruit well enough to win in Knoxville. Those questions have been answered.
My family is stocked with Tennessee alums and fans, my dad was even born right here in Knoxville, and they have been burned a lot over the last decade or so. However, I’ve been telling them like I’m telling you, the reader, now the same thing: Tennessee is once again stable and fun and the best is yet to come in Knoxville.
You can breathe a sigh of relief.
Championship bells may not be right around the corner, but stability, energy and real competition is here now. The state of affairs on Rocky Top have not been this good in a long time, so don’t forget to appreciate that. The old days are called the old days for a reason.