Why Year 2 For Josh Heupel At Tennessee Will Be A Boom Or Bust
A lot of folks feel like the 2022 Tennessee football team should live around 8-4. Here's why that linear improvement is unlikely.
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We like linear progression in our daily life, and especially in our sports. It is no wonder why, of course, as it is quite comforting. The “get a little bit better each day” mantra is a powerful one. A lot of folks, and leaders especially, push the idea that if you work really hard and prioritize getting a little bit better each day then the results will soon follow. It’s a comforting belief that by putting in the time, each day, that gradually over time you will make incremental improvement. Even better, the results follow that same timeline.
It’s safe, comforting and gets a lot of us through the day.
Of course, this is often not how life works.
It rarely unfolds the way you expect it to. It can be frustrating, though, because if you do the work and you go about things the right way, then you should see gradual improvement and gradual results. It makes sense that this is how life should work. There is no doubt in my mind that the Bulldogs in Starkville are getting better each and everyday, but Mississippi State football fans cannot bank on incremental improvements and gradual success year-over-year for Mike Leach’s program. If anything, the Bulldogs are the perfect example of a team where they’ll go 6-6 one year and 9-3 the next to 4-8 the year after that. Even Dan Mullen, maybe the best coach in Mississippi State football history, went 9-3 in Year 2 and flipped back to 6-6 the following season.
This is where Tennessee football comes into focus.
Folks here on Rocky Top are feeling pretty good considering where the Volunteers were just a year-and-a-half ago. Head coach Josh Heupel surprised folks on Rocky Top and folks on the opposing sidelines in the SEC in 2021. The team won seven regular season games when a lot of folks weren’t certain a March For Six was realistic or even fair for Heupel entering Year 1 at Tennessee given the circumstances.
Now, because Heupel won seven games in Year 1, folks are falling back into the “progress is linear” trap. If you ask most Volunteer fans around Knoxville what they think is a reasonable expectation for Tennessee this season, the common record they throw out is 8-4. It’d be a one-game improvement from a season ago. With Hendon Hooker, Cedric Tillman and company back, folks don’t see why the offense shouldn’t still be top-10 nationally. It’s also Year 2 for defensive coordinator Tim Banks, so the expectation, even with question marks in the secondary and along the interior, folks see the defense taking a step forward, too. Throw in a former five-star transfer wideout in Bru McCoy and Vol fans are feeling like this team should be close to what they were a season ago just with a better result against Pitt this time around.
Sweep the East again outside of Georgia, beat Pitt, and there you have your eight wins.
I already mentioned Mullen in this column, but his experience in Starkville is not unique around the rest of the SEC. Mullen won five regular season games in his first year and nine regular season games the following year. Kirby Smart won eight his first season and 10 the following season. Lane Kiffin won five his first season and 10 the following season. Sam Pittman won 3 his first season and eight the following season.
You could point to Butch Jones’ tenure at Tennessee, though, in terms of fair timelines. We do not have to relitigate the situation Jones walked into in 2013, but his rise and fall followed a very linear progression. From five wins to six to eight to eight again and then the bottom falling out. Jones was fired in 2017 after an 0-6 start in the conference. Jones and the Vols got a little a bit better each year. In Year 3 and Year 4, Jones beat Georgia. He lost to Alabama by 5 on the road in Tuscaloosa in 2015.
2022 Tennessee strikes me as the closest to 2015 Tennessee.
Sure, it was Year 3 for Butch and it’s Year 2 for Josh, but with the addition of the transfer portal and immediate eligibility, it’s fair to expect what was the Year 3 jump to happen in Year 2 for most coaches. That was the case for all those SEC coaches I listed above.
The 2022 schedule is even set up for more success than what lied in front of Jones in 2015. Jones had to travel to Florida in 2015 and take on Oklahoma at home early. For Heupel, he gets Pitt without Kenny Pickett and Jordan Addison on the road, and he gets Florida at home early. Before Kentucky on Halloween, those 2015 Volunteers were 3-4. They did not lose another game after Alabama. The same could be true for Tennessee, where after Alabama the Vols will likely be favored in five of their last six games. That scary trip on the road in Baton Rouge comes after a bye week. Like those 2015 Volunteers, it feels like Tennessee could be hovering around .500 before going on a late-season surge.
However, that’s too logical.
You go 3-3 early, and then you win five of six down the stretch with only a loss in Athens as a blemish once the leaves change in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Boom.
The Vols hit that 8-4 number so many folks expect. It’s the most linear, logical progression.
It’s also the least likely.
We have seen it now with so many other SEC coaches now. If Hendon Hooker is even better than the guy with a 31-3 touchdown-to-interception split in 2022, the Vols likely have the best quarterback in the division. The offense should be right there with Georgia. Last season, the Rebels, Crimson Tide, Bulldogs, Wildcats and Razorbacks all won eight or more games. It is no coincidence that those five teams had elite quarterback play throughout the 2021 college football season.
Tennessee was the only Power 5 program last season to not win double-digit games while also being in the top-10 in scoring offense. Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Georgia all won at least 10 games with the same kind of offensive numbers Tennessee put up every Saturday.
Tennessee winning 10 games would undoubtedly turn some heads both in Knoxville and around the country in 2022. That’s a lot of victories, and that likely would require a split between Georgia and Alabama, but that’s how sports usually works. It’s either a bigger jump than most expected or a bigger step back than most expect.
6-6 and 9-3 or 10-2 is far more likely for the 2022 Volunteers than 8-4. The latter makes too much linear sense. The former is where things likely fall. If it’s 6-6 then injuries happened and the defense was even worse than a season ago and Tim Banks is probably not around for Year 3 in Knoxville. (Fair or not, if Tennessee is in the top-10, even the top-5 in scoring offense in 2022, and the defense still can’t get off the field on critical third downs, it’ll be extremely difficult to not make a change.) If Hooker is healthy for all 12 games, and he has a 2019 Dillon Gabriel season where the Vols are in the top-5 in scoring offense like UCF was and he’s a legitimate Heisman candidate, then 9 or 10 wins is probably happening. In today’s football world, elite offense wins far more often than it does not. Elite offenses with elite quarterbacks win even more.
Brace yourselves Tennessee fans, 2022 and Year 2 for Josh Heupel on Rocky Top is going to be a whole lot more interesting than you might expect.
Chase Thomas is the Sports Renaissance Man, Atlanta Sports Guy and Vol For Life. He is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee and resides in Knoxville, TN. Chase obtained his undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of North Georgia. He has written for a variety of publications that include Outsider, SB Nation, VICE Sports, SI’s The Cauldron, Cox Media Group & ESPN’s TrueHoop Network. You can email him at chasethomaspodcast[at]gmail.