It’s fair to question whether Josh Heupel needs to make a major change he clearly doesn’t want to make to get Tennessee to a championship level
Josh Heupel is doing an excellent job for the Volunteers, but he may need to reconsider his approach if he’s going to take Tennessee to a championship level.
The Tennessee Vols have a good football team this season.
Tennessee is 5-1 at the midway point of the season. If they go 5-1 in their final six games of the regular season, they’ll have a legitimate shot at reaching the 12-team College Football Playoff.
The Vols, however, aren’t viewed by most folks in the media as a legit playoff contender.
And that’s because of one thing: quarterback play.
Tennessee is rolling with two inexperienced options in true freshman Faizon Brandon and sophomore George MacIntyre. Both players are immensely talented, but both are still very much developing. They’re both going through some growing pains as they adjust to life as an SEC quarterback.
Tennessee has an elite defense right now, they have one of the best running backs in the nation in DeSean Bishop, and a couple of stud wide receivers in Mike Matthews and Braylon Staley.
The one thing holding this team back is quarterback play.
If the Vols had an experienced quarterback right now, they’d probably be 6-0.
It’s fair to ask if Josh Heupel should change his quarterback approach
I understand what Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel wants to do. He wants to develop talented quarterbacks directly out of high school over the course of a few seasons. I absolutely believe this is the best way to develop quarterbacks, and I think it’s the right way to build a program.
But it’s not what the current state of college football demands.
This is a win-now sport. I don’t love it — I’m always going to believe in development — but it’s reality.
Tennessee has a roster that reportedly cost somewhere around $35 to $40 million. That’s the kind of money you spend to reach the playoff. But it’s going to be hard to get to the playoff and win games with an inexperienced quarterback.
I’m not saying it can’t be done — the Vols got to the playoff in 2024 with redshirt freshman quarterback Nico Iamaleava — I’m just saying it’s probably the toughest way to get there.
To this point, Heupel’s strategy of signing high school quarterbacks isn’t working out the way he envisioned. It’s tough to develop those players while in win-now mode (in a perfect world they sit for a couple of years and then start, but it’s tough to keep quarterbacks from transferring with that approach).
Tennessee’s best offenses have been with an experienced transfer quarterback under center (Hendon Hooker and Joey Aguilar). That’s also an approach that’s working across the sport (there’s no substitute for live game reps — even if those reps are at a lower level of college football).
Maybe Brandon or MacIntyre take a big step by the end of the season and emerge as a top SEC quarterback heading into the 2027 season. I think every Tennessee fan is rooting for that outcome.
But if that doesn’t happen by the end of the 2026 season, then I think it’s fair for Vols fans to expect Heupel to dip into the portal and find an experienced option that can execute Tennessee’s offense at a high level in 2027.
The Vols’ defense is good enough this season to win a national championship (as long as everyone stays healthy). But the offense, at least right now, isn’t. And that’s because of the quarterback situation.
Again, I respect Heupel’s approach, and I wish it wasn’t this way, but he’s got to start finding a win-now option at quarterback every year. Unfortunately, there just isn’t time to develop quarterbacks the right way anymore.
