Tennessee football hires Josh Heupel: Five reasons this could work

2. Defensive guy already in place

The drawback to Josh Heupel as Tennessee football’s head coach has been defensive woes. This past year, he lost a game in which his offense scored 49 points because his defense gave up 50. For the year, the defense gave up 33.2 points a game, which ranked 92nd out of 127 teams in FBS play. That’s a big drop-off from the roughly 23 points a game it gave up in 2018 and 2019.

However, the Vols may already have a solution to offset that. They didn’t just hire Kevin Steele for no reason when they likely knew they were going to fire Jeremy Pruitt. Steele could be more than just an overseer for the program as it goes through this transition.

If Heupel keeps Steele on, then the defensive side of the ball is set. All he has to do is focus on offense and scoring as many points as possible. Steele may not be head coach material, but outside of one bad game against the West Virginia Mountaineers nearly a decade ago, he’s a proven defensive mind.

These two coaches could have exactly what Heupel and Barry Odom did in 2016 and 2017. Odom focused on defense with the Missouri Tigers and let Heupel run the show offensively, and it worked to perfection. In fact, that success leads to our final reason this could work.