SEC strength makes Vols' rebuilding process even tougher

Tennessee Athletics photo / Tennessee first-year football coach Josh Heupel speaks to his players after a practice earlier this month.
Tennessee Athletics photo / Tennessee first-year football coach Josh Heupel speaks to his players after a practice earlier this month.

The Tennessee Volunteers are just days away from kicking off the Josh Heupel era and the 100-year anniversary season of Neyland Stadium.

Neyland's 10 decades are filled with pleasant memories for the orange-clad faithful.

The 1939 team not yielding a point that entire regular season. The 14-13 upset of No. 1 LSU in 1959. The early 1970s wizardry of quarterback Condredge Holloway. Ending Alabama's 11 straight series triumphs in 1982. And perhaps the loudest moment in the stadium's history: Clint Stoerner's fumble in the 1998 comeback win over Arkansas.

Yet memories are what Tennessee fans are having to cling to more and more amid a 78-82 stretch since the start of Phillip Fulmer's final season in 2008, which happened to be the year Alabama took off under Nick Saban. Going toe to toe with Alabama and pummeling Vanderbilt have been replaced by getting routed by the Crimson Tide and going toe to toe with the Commodores.

Other Southeastern Conference power programs such as Auburn, Florida, Georgia and LSU are either beating Alabama on occasion or playing in New Year's Six bowls with regularity, but Tennessee is now 23 years removed from its most recent league crown - easily marking the longest drought in program history - and 14 years from its last appearance in an SEC title game, with Oklahoma and Texas soon packing their bags to join the neighborhood.

Perhaps stating things more bluntly, are Alabama and other teams at the top of the SEC too dominant to where the Vols are relegated to have-not status with little to no chance of rejoining the elite in the foreseeable future?

"There is this reality playing out that you've seen the success at the University of Alabama," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. "We've had a mix of teams since 2006 have the opportunity to play for national championships, and no other league has come close to that mix of teams. There are different reasons, I think, for some of the turnover at some of the other programs, but I don't think we have haves and have-nots. There are a lot of haves in this league.

"If you look back at women's basketball when (Tennessee's) Pat Summitt set a standard for everyone and made everyone better, I think we're seeing that effect. Skip Bertman led LSU to all those baseball championships, and our baseball is better today because Skip Bertman was part of this conference. Alabama has been successful, but everybody else is working every day to achieve that same level, which makes everyone better."

Heupel will be the sixth Tennessee coach to try to defeat Saban's Tide, and he's among the eight SEC coaches either in their first or second seasons in the league. Sam Pittman is in his second year at Arkansas, which is just 4-30 in SEC games the past four seasons, while Shane Beamer is the new coach at South Carolina, which is 6-16 overall the past two years.

Ten years ago, Arkansas and South Carolina each went 11-2.

photo Tennessee Athletics photo / Tennessee sixth-year receiver Velus Jones Jr. believes a more connected team will result in a better season compared to a year ago.

"It is hard to get back up," Sankey said. "When I visit with people who think about taking jobs here or have accepted roles, you are stepping into a professional challenge and a career challenge, and you accept that. Josh knows what he's entering, and he wants to challenge himself at the highest level of college athletics to see what he can build, and I think that's exciting. I respect those who step in and try.

"People have to have patience. It's an impatient society, and I think that's a dynamic that has changed around college football since the 1970s and 1980s. The timetable has shortened, but continuity is an important element of success. That's proven itself, but you have to have success to earn continuity. He has the resources, the fan base and the talent, but it's a building process."

Heupel doesn't have the talent right now to match the league's top teams due to a massive personnel exodus through the NCAA transfer portal, so he's looking for his offensive system to give the Vols a dose of reasonable hope. In his two years as Missouri's offensive coordinator in 2016-17 and in the past three seasons as Central Florida's head coach, Heupel's offenses produced dazzling results.

"If you look at the last three national champions offensively, I think every team has averaged over 520 yards," Heupel said. "We were in the top five in basically every offensive category the last three years, and the two previous years while we were at Missouri, we led the league in total offense. This is a quarterback-friendly offense that's going to allow us to play fast and apply pressure to defenses every single Saturday that we step on the football field.

"Obviously, we understand that in this league the line of scrimmage is extremely important, too, but I think the tempo on the offensive side gives us the ability to create an advantage in that aspect. We've got to continue to recruit and develop big, large people up front that will change the line of scrimmage as we continue to play."

Heupel is also building a foundation through relationships, which appeared to be lacking last season when the Jeremy Pruitt era ended with seven losses in the last eight games. Stress in the program was evident when Pruitt fired his defensive line coach, Jimmy Brumbaugh, a day after the embarrassing 34-7 home loss to Kentucky.

Dodgeball games and ice cream parties were just a couple of ways this spring in which Heupel got Tennessee players to rid themselves of last season's sour taste.

"The first night I got hired, I had about an hour-and-a-half meeting with them, and one of the things that I realized that they wanted and needed was connection," Heupel said. "We spent an inordinate amount of time connecting with our players, getting to know their strengths, their struggles, their greatest triumphs and the hardships that they faced. We've had a lot of fun in doing that."

Said receiver Velus Jones Jr.: "Doing fun things at practice or after practice doesn't mean you're going to win the SEC championship or make it to the College Football Playoff, but what's a team without connection or brotherhood? You don't stand a chance. Coach Heupel has brought that into the program, and it's definitely working. It's really brought the team together."

Perhaps a worthwhile connection is indeed being made to form that needed foundation. Perhaps there will be patience, and perhaps Heupel will be the coach who eventually gets Tennessee back to an elite level.

It's just hard to move back up in today's SEC.

Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.

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