Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel is 35-14 in four years as a head coach.

This past season, Heupel took the Vols from 3-7 with the No. 109 scoring offense in the nation (in 2020 under previous UT head coach Jeremy Pruitt) to 7-6 with the No. 7 scoring in the nation.

Heupel isn't in an elite tier of coaches just yet — he still has a lot to prove — but I think it's obvious he's among the top 25-30 coaches in the country.

The Athletic, however, doesn't agree.

Bruce Feldman and Stewart Mandel both ranked their top 25 coaches in college football this week (as they do each year around this time) and neither of them had Heupel on their list.

To make matters worse, neither of them even had Heupel among their 9 or 10 coaches that "just missed the cut".

They aren't giving Heupel and the Vols any credit at all. Before last season, there were folks who thought Tennessee might only win four or five games in 2021.

Heupel blew past those expectations by winning seven games in the regular season (while operating under the cloud of an NCAA investigation). It would've easily been nine wins if the ball bounces the Vols' way in the losses to Pittsburgh and Ole Miss (the Ole Miss game truly could've gone either way).

The offensive improvement alone last season puts Heupel among the top 25-30 coaches in the nation. That type of improvement in one year — with an extremely thin roster — is beyond rare. It's almost unbelievable.

I'm not about to claim that Heupel deserves to be in the top 10. Like I said, he has a lot to prove still. But he's done more than enough to get some respect from The Athletic.

Then again, it's not like what The Athletic thinks matters all that much. Mandel, after all, had LSU's Ed Orgeron and Florida's Dan Mullen in his top 10 last year. And both of those coaches were fired before the end of the year.

Maybe it's best that Heupel isn't on this list.

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