During Josh Heupel’s debut season as Tennessee’s football coach in 2021, the Volunteers surrendered more than 500 yards against Florida, Ole Miss and Alabama, and more than 600 yards against Kentucky and Purdue.
Things are a bit different these days.
The No. 7 Vols have an opportunity under Heupel and fourth-year defensive coordinator Tim Banks to make it four consecutive contests without allowing a defensive touchdown Saturday night (7:45 on the SEC Network) when they host Kent State. Tennessee’s current streak of three is a first for the program since the 1985 Southeastern Conference championship team.
“Tim has done an unbelievable job, and that’s really from day one of being here,” Heupel said during Monday’s news conference. “He has been building camaraderie, trust and chemistry on that side of the football. We have continued to build our roster and are able to play more guys, which is important.
“The understanding of our scheme and the fundamentals of it is a credit to our players and our coaches. We’re playing really good football right now.”
Kent State is 0-2 this season and is coming off a 23-17 home loss to Saint Francis, a Championship Subdivision member from Loretto, Pennsylvania.
In this three-game run that began with the 35-0 skunking of Iowa in January’s Citrus Bowl and continued with the 69-3 dismantling of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Aug. 31 and this past Saturday night’s 51-10 rout of North Carolina State in Charlotte, the Vols are allowing 2.3 yards per rush and 3.2 yards per play.
Tennessee has held its past three opponents to an average of 181.0 yards, 6-of-41 on third-down conversions while racking up 26 tackles for loss, nine sacks and seven takeaways, with this dramatic rise in success resulting in Banks being asked Tuesday whether his defense was exceeding his expectations.
“I don’t know about exceeding, but we’re definitely playing hard,” Banks said. “We’ve been building this thing since day one, and we’ve got a really good staff. I haven’t been surprised at how hard we’ve played, but there are still obviously things we want to get better at and improve on.
“Our standard is our standard in terms of how hard we want to play and how tough we want to be, so as long as we continue to do that, we think we have a chance to continue to build.”
The Vols have gone 17 consecutive quarters without allowing a defensive touchdown against nonconference opposition, but Banks reiterated Tuesday that he has never been into statistics. The only numbers he likes are the numbers of players he has used through the two decisive victories.
“We had a plan going into this fall that we wanted to play a lot of guys at every position,” Banks said. “If the guys work hard, we want to give them what they deserve. We think our front is our strength just based on the sheer number of guys that we’ve got who can play at a high level, and that’s who we want to be.
“That’s who we’ve wanted to be from day one.”
For those defenders who have been a part of this rebuild from the start, there is no time like the present.
“It feels great just for us to get this recognition,” fifth-year senior defensive tackle Bryson Eason said. “People are finally starting to wake up. I feel like we’ve been one of the better units defensively in the country, but we’ve got to keep working to continue to get better. We want elite status, and there is always room for improvement.”
And for those new to the Vols, this defense has been a blast.
“This defense is amazing,” redshirt junior safety and Middle Tennessee State transfer Jakobe Thomas said. “It’s so fun to play in. It’s just carnage. We talk about carnage and just guys being everywhere making plays.”
Said sophomore cornerback and Oregon State transfer Jermod McCoy: “We want the other team to feel our energy and know that we came to play.”
‘Getting after them’
The Vols ran 44 times Saturday night in Charlotte while attempting only 23 passes, and Notre Dame transfer tight end Holden Staes said there was good reason for that.
“Going into the game, we knew that NC State’s defense was a three-down front and that they had the opportunity to drop eight in coverage,” Staes said, “so we said we were going to take advantage of that and just run the ball and ultimately make them fit the run, so that was the plan going in. We just wanted to use that as our advantage and be super physical.
“As the game wore on, you could tell that we were getting after them pretty good and they didn’t want to tackle towards the end. That’s how those big runs opened up.”
Odds and ends
Tennessee has allowed two sacks so far this season, with the starting offensive front having yet to yield any. … Since Heupel took the reins at UCF in 2018, no Bowl Subdivision coach has averaged more than his 11.94 points per game during the first quarter. … The Vols went 7-0 last season and are 2-0 so far when holding opponents to fewer than 100 rushing yards a game.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.