‘It’s a very bad sign’ – Paul Finebaum gets real about Josh Heupel and the Tennessee Vols and details a real concern
Josh Heupel and the Tennessee Volunteers are looking to rebound this fall after finishing last season with two straight losses. The Vols’ loss to Vanderbilt to end the regular season was particularly painful on Rocky Top.
Longtime college football talk show host Paul Finebaum made it very clear this week that he believes the Tennessee Vols are trending in the wrong direction under Josh Heupel.
Finebaum joined Crain & Cone this week and offered some strong thoughts on the Tennessee football program.
I bring Josh Heupel up, I like him — he has made the playoffs one time,” said Finebaum. “But he’s been there four or five years, and it feels like the program is going in the wrong direction. That should not happen, and it’s a very bad sign for a name brand program. And maybe I’m old school enough to still believe that Tennessee is one of those schools that should always be at or near the top.
“But the end of last season was a complete disaster. Losing at home to Oklahoma, and they also lost at home to Vanderbilt. They badly lost the bowl game (against Illinois). You can’t let that happen. And then they got some bad luck in court [by] losing (Joey) Aguilar, but they don’t have a quarterback. You guys tell me, how you can win in the SEC without a quarterback?”
Are Paul Finebaum’s comments about Josh Heupel and the Vols fair?
I don’t disagree with Finebaum that the end of last season was a disaster for Tennessee.
The Vols didn’t show up against Vanderbilt, and the performance against Illinois was uninspiring. But I think some of that was because the air was taken out of the team once the College Football Playoff was off the table (I think that’s something most programs are going to struggle with now that college football is a tournament sport).
My biggest issue with Finebaum’s comments is that he’s still approaching his college football “analysis” (or hot takes in this case) like it’s 10 or 20 years ago. And you just can’t do that anymore.
Essentially, whatever happened in college football before the rise of NIL in the post-Covid era doesn’t apply anymore. It doesn’t matter what Tennessee’s reputation was under Phillip Fulmer, Derek Dooley, or Butch Jones. It doesn’t matter how many championships Alabama won under Nick Saban, or what Florida did when Urban Meyer was in town.
Rosters are built via big budgets now. Relationships and coaching are still extremely important to winning — the most talented rosters that are the most well-coached and most well-connected will be the teams that go the furthest. But if a program wants to compete for a championship in college football, they have to build a strong roster via a mix of the transfer portal and retaining high school talent.
This new era of college football means that some years, the roster combination just isn’t going to be quite right. Maybe a team pays the wrong quarterback (sometimes you don’t know who the guy is until they’re under the lights). Or maybe injuries wreck the season (quality depth is nearly impossible to build thanks to the portal/NIL).
The Oklahoma Sooners are a great example of how quickly a program can go from wanting to fire the head coach to being a playoff team. Oklahoma went 6-7 in 2024 and Brent Venables entered the 2025 season on the hot seat as a result. The Sooners then went 10-2 during the regular season and reached the playoff. If a narrative can change that quickly, should it be narrative at all?
I just don’t think we can judge head coaches the same we did a decade ago. The landscape of the sport has drastically changed.
Finebaum, however, hasn’t calibrated his hot take machine to align with the new era of college football. And until he does, he’ll continue to dish out antiquated takes like the one he dropped about Heupel and the Vols this week.