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Stop me if you’ve heard this before — a pivotal year awaits in Knoxville.
Stunning, I know. Next, I’ll break the news that SEC fans care about football. Some years are indeed more important than others. You could argue that Josh Heupel has Tennessee in a better place than it’s been since the early-2000s. The Vols are riding their best 3-year stretch since that time, and for a program that was searching for its first top-10 finish in 20 years upon Heupel’s arrival, it’s fair to say that the laughing stock days of Tennessee football are in the rearview mirror.
So what awaits? The most pivotal year of Heupel’s career.
Some might misinterpret that as a way of saying that Heupel’s job is in jeopardy. It’s not. Never say never with Tennessee, but paying Heupel a $28.5 million buyout to go away after a down 2025 would be a stunning revelation coming from the program that plotted against Jeremy Pruitt to fire him with cause and avoid the $12 million buyout that he would’ve been owed.
But make no mistake, now is Heupel’s time to seize his opportunity. Go back a few years ago and tell Tennessee fans that in 2025, not only would it be Nico Iamaleava’s pre-Draft season as a Year 2 starter, but it would also have Tim Banks running the defense in Year 5 fresh off a season in which he was a Broyles Award finalist. There’s a window in 2025, and history tells us that if it isn’t seized, it could be a downhill slope from there.
Since the SEC Championship became a thing in 1992, 21 head coaches reached the conference title game for the first time. The only coaches who made their first appearance post-Year 3 in the conference were:
- Year 5 Houston Nutt, Arkansas
- Year 5 Phillip Fulmer, Tennessee
- Year 6 Steve Spurrier, South Carolina
- Year 8 Jackie Sherrill, Mississippi State (7th SEC Championship opportunity possible)
That’s it. If Heupel reaches Atlanta — Tennessee is No. 3 in the SEC with +700 odds to win the conference (via FanDuel) — he’ll join that rare group of coaches, all of whom accomplished that feat in the 12-team SEC, not the 14- or the current 16-team SEC.
Granted, it’s an expanded SEC and it’s also an expanded Playoff. Tennessee knows as much as anyone that a path to the Playoff doesn’t have to include a pitstop in Atlanta. It is, however, still the most direct path. And obviously, the most direct path for the Vols to earn a trip back to the Playoff — with hopes of not getting their doors blown off upon arrival — is Iamaleava taking that next step.
Iamaleava was billed as a dream recruit for the offensive-minded Heupel to develop. The Vols literally went to court vs. the NCAA (and won) to defend their pursuit of him. The Heupel tenure was always going to be defined by whether he could develop elite quarterbacks like Iamaleava. Heupel deserves a ton of credit for turning Hendon Hooker into 1 of the 5 best quarterbacks in the sport in 2022. What’s easy to forget is that Hooker wasn’t even a Heupel recruit. He transferred to Tennessee before the Pruitt firing was official. Joe Milton joined Tennessee a few months after Heupel’s arrival, but like Hooker, he was also a transfer.
There’s no shame in being transfer-reliant at quarterback. Go look at Heupel’s alma mater Oklahoma, who had 2 Heisman Trophy winners and a runner-up in the Playoff era, but also hasn’t had a starting quarterback begin AND finish their career in Norman since Landry Jones (he’ll turn 36 years old next month). Go look at Oregon, who just sent consecutive former transfer quarterbacks to New York. One of those quarterbacks, Dillon Gabriel, got his start working with Heupel at UCF.
Heupel hasn’t worked with a starting quarterback for the entirety of his career since … Jones. Iamaleava was expected to be that guy. For all we know, he can still be that guy. There’ll be no sort of easing into things like we saw in 2024 with a ground-heavy approach that atypically struggled to stretch the field in the passing game. Iamaleava was No. 12 in the SEC with just 14.9% of his passes traveling 20 yards. We know that arm talent and scheme weren’t working against that. To be fair, Heupel rode the Dylan Sampson train all the way to the Playoff.
But if Iamaleava isn’t a star in 2025, what’ll that say about Heupel as an elite offensive mind in this sport? He doesn’t have a starting quarterback at the next level. Quarterbacks like Hooker, Milton and even Drew Lock, who he coached at Mizzou for 2 years, are holding clipboards in the NFL. If Iamaleava doesn’t play close to an All-SEC level, the odds of him becoming that elite 2026 NFL Draft prospect aren’t great. He could run it back. Alternatively, he could search for a new place to take his talents. That’s always on the table in the portal world.
That’d be the toughest pill for Heupel to swallow during his 5 years in Knoxville. Of course, that’s not necessarily imminent. It’d be unfair to say that it’s imminent that Heupel’s approval rating will dip, too.
It is, however, worth noting that life in the SEC is often quicker than expected. Coaches who last a decade at the same SEC job fall into 1 of 2 camps. Either they took over a disastrous situation and they added tremendous stability like Mark Stoops at Kentucky, or they won a national title and earned several years of grace like Kirby Smart. Heupel is somewhere in the middle of that. Nobody can deny that he took over a disastrous situation post-Jeremy Pruitt firing, but nobody can deny that expectations at Tennessee are a different beast than they are at Kentucky. Angst ramps up when a program like that feels like it hit its ceiling.
Perhaps Heupel didn’t take the job with “title or bust” implications. Shoot, at the time that Heupel arrived, the Vols hadn’t beaten an AP top-10 team in 15 years. They’ve since beaten 3 top-10 squads, 2 of which were games against Alabama in Knoxville. That matters. But it also matters if you can take that next step instead of being on the outside looking in at the sport’s elite. Heupel still has time to get there.
Plenty of Vols fans remember that conversation with Fulmer. He didn’t get there with his prized quarterback recruit, Peyton Manning, and instead, he reached the college football mountain top in Year 7 immediately after he left. If the Iamaleava era ends without playing for an SEC title or reaching the Playoff semifinals, that historical perspective will preserve some optimism for Heupel.
But as Heupel enters the latter half of the 2020s, the SEC is up for grabs. Now feels like a pivotal time to take it.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
