Prominent college football program is planning to mimic Tennessee Vols' offense in 2023
A prominent college football program will be looking to run an offense similar to what the Tennessee Vols run under Josh Heupel
They say the NFL is a copycat league. The same can be said about college football.
Which is why it's not a surprise that at least one prominent college football program is planning to mimic the Tennessee Vols' offense in 2023.
Josh Heupel's Tennessee offense led the nation in scoring in 2022 at 46.1 points per game. Just two years prior, when Jeremy Pruitt was the head coach, the Vols were No. 109 in the nation in scoring at 21.5 points per game.
The Vols came up short of their ultimate goal in 2022 — a national championship — but the program still had its best season since 2001.
Tennessee ended the 2022 season with a 31-14 win over the Clemson Tigers in the Orange Bowl.
The Vols' offense must have made quite an impression on Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney. Less than two weeks after the loss to Tennessee, Swinney fired offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter.
Swinney replaced Streeter with TCU offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, a coach who has his roots in the Air Raid system made famous by Hal Mumme and Mike Leach (Riley played at Texas Tech under Leach and later coached under current USC head coach Lincoln Riley at East Carolina before Riley was hired by Oklahoma).
Riley will bring a new offense to Clemson in 2023. And based on comments from Tigers quarterback Cade Klubnik this past week, it will be an offense that's similar to Tennessee's offense.
"You look at what Tennessee could do (last season) and everybody talked about how fast they played, I think that's going to be a lot similar to what we're going to be doing this next year," explained Klubnik. "Just the speed we can play at but also the efficiency. It's not a bunch of guys running around trying to figure out what we're doing. Even in the first day (of practice), after 10 minutes guys were running around and getting to the spot and snapping the ball 15 seconds later."
"It's fun," added Klubnik. "You're running around, you're getting set, snapping the ball, and getting six more yards. Then you're taking a shot, you're getting six more, six more, then taking a shot. It's just fun. That's the best way to describe it. It's just a fun offense to play in."
When something works as well as Tennessee's offense, it's inevitable that other programs will look to use a similar approach.
The thing that folks don't realize, however, is that Tennessee's offense isn't elite just because Heupel and his staff chose this particular system/approach (which is ever-evolving, by the way). It's the coaching that really makes the offense work. Plenty of other programs run similar offenses. And some of them have been extremely successful. But no one does it as well as the Vols.
Just because Clemson is switching to an offense that is similar to Tennessee's doesn't automatically mean that the Tigers will be putting up nearly 50 points a game in 2023. In fact, the only way that happens is if Swinney gets out of Riley's way and lets him have complete control of the offense.
Regardless of whether or not Clemson's new offense works under Riley, one thing is clear — Tennessee is changing the way elite coaches approach the game. And I think that says a lot about Heupel's influence on college football as teams begin preparing for the 2023 season.
