With 15 seconds remaining in last Saturday’s titanic football showdown between Alabama and Tennessee, most of the 101,915 spectators in Neyland Stadium were delirious after Will Reichard’s miss of a 50-yard field goal left the game deadlocked at 49-49.
Not Josh Heupel.
The second-year Volunteers coach had work to perform and little time to perform it.
“You practice those things in training camp — how you want to function and operate in a lot of different scenarios,” Heupel said this week in a news conference. “It’s impossible to give guys those scenarios every week, but I love the fact that our kids understood what we were trying to accomplish. From our wideouts to our quarterback to our protection up front, we had to be able to go out and execute in that situation, and the fact we still had timeouts left was critical.
“It was a big-time performance by those guys at the end of the football game.”