SPORTS
Heupel brings offensive mind, quarterback development to Tennessee JOSH LANE 2021 Sports Editor
Tennessee has hired a new football coach. The university announced on Jan. 27 that Josh Heupel will be the program’s next head football coach. Heupel will take over following the firing of Jeremy Pruitt on Jan. 18 for multiple Level 1 and Level 2 NCAA violations. Heupel brings a lot of experience to Knoxville. He was the head coach at the University of Central Florida for three years and was hired at UCF in 2017 by Danny White, who was the athletic director there at the time and is now the Vols’ AD. Heupel had a standout career as a quarterback at Oklahoma under head coach Bob Stoops. In 2000, he finished as the Heisman Trophy runner-up, as well as an All-American, the AP Player of the Year and a Walter Camp Award winner. Heupel led the Sooners to an undefeated season and a national championship that same season. After a brief stint in the NFL, Heupel returned to his alma mater as a graduate assistant to Stoops. In 2006, he was named the quarterbacks coach at Oklahoma, where he had great suc-
On Rocky Top
|
Student Media
|
16
Courtesy of St. Louis Post
cess. Heupel coached Sam Bradford in 2008, his Heisman Trophy winning year. In 2010, Heupel was promoted to the Sooners’ co-offensive coordinator, where he was in charge of calling plays. He served in this role until 2015, when he was fired following an 8-5 season. “It gave me a chance in some ways,“ Heupel said of his firing. “Just to kind of restart and
look at what I want to do on the offensive side of the football. . . . It gave me an opportunity to reshift my focus on what I wanted to be as far as an identity on the offensive side of football.” Heupel spent one season as the offensive coordinator at Utah State and two seasons in the SEC as Missouri’s quarterbacks coach/offensive coordinator, where the Tigers led the SEC in total offense. That brings Heupel’s career up to 2017, when as mentioned earlier, he was hired by White as
