Former Vol who played for Josh Heupel thinks there’s an important change that Tennessee’s head coach is now open to making
Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel may be spread too thin on game days.
I think Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel is one of the top 1o or 15 coaches in college football (the order doesn’t matter…there are too many variables to accurately rank head coaches).
Heupel, however, still has room to grow as a head coach.
In 2025, it became obvious that Heupel has too much on his plate on game days. Tennessee struggled in several end-of-half situations, likely because Heupel was trying to manage the offensive play-calling and the game as a whole at the same time.
“I would say his tweak this offseason needs to be in terms of game management,” said the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Adam Sparks in November. “Because if you look at him on the sideline — usually you can’t see this on TV, but live you can — he’s obviously calling plays. He’s communicating a lot. Some of the game management and time management issues they’ve had in two or three games this year has been where he’s obviously trying to do three different jobs at one time.”
Former Vols offensive lineman Ollie Lane thinks Josh Heupel understands he needs to delegate more
Former Vols offensive lineman Ollie Lane, who played for Heupel for three seasons (2021–2023), said this week on The Sports Source that he thinks Tennessee’s head coach understands he needs to delegate more responsibilities in 2026.
“I’d say one thing that I think they’re probably doing is internally dishing off and delegating some of those tasks to their coordinators as they continue to grow up,” said Lane. “I mean, you’ve heard (offensive coordinator) Joey Halzle say in the past [that] there’s been a learning curve for him jumping in the OC position.
“I think now that [Halzle] is rolling into year four being in that position, [Heupel] is going to take the reins off with that one. I think [Halzle] is going to now have more control of what this offense does. And I think Heupel noticed that this year and was [thinking something] like, ‘I’ve got to start giving some of this stuff off to these coordinators, because there’s only so much that I can truly handle in a high stakes game.’”
Lane has unique insight into how Heupel operates, so I think his opinion is certainly worth paying attention to. We’ll see next season whether Heupel does actually delegate more play-calling responsibilities on game days to Halzle.
Because as Lane noted, 2026 will be year four of Halzle being the offensive coordinator at Tennessee. Surely he has enough experience by now to have more autonomy in the play-calling process.
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