Tennessee football: Music City Bowl doesn’t undo Josh Heupel’s early success

Last week’s loss to the Purdue Boilermakers hurt Tennessee football fans for a lot of reasons. The Vols were much healthier, so they should have won, they lost in front of their home crowd and they finished 7-6 instead of 8-5. Oh, and everybody’s still mad about the officiating.

All of those feelings are valid. However, they shouldn’t negate what happened this past year, their first season under Josh Heupel. Remember, this time last year, the Vols were about to fire Jeremy Pruitt and overhaul their athletic department due to an NCAA investigation.

That investigation hung over the program until November. Tennessee football hired Heupel the final week of January, a week after Danny White replaced Phillip Fulmer as athletic director of the program. Nobody would debate the mess Heupel inherited.

UT lost 25 players to transfer, including numerous starters. They were also coming off a 3-7 season, and six of the commitments in their already-mediocre 2021 class, either due to asking out of their letter of intent or for some other reason, never made it to the start of the year.

Then came the schedule. The Vols played the two teams who just happen to be facing off for a national championship, the Alabama Crimson Tide and Georgia Bulldogs. They also played the Ole Miss Rebels with Matt Corral healthy, and they faced the ACC Champion Pittsburgh Panthers.

In Corral, Bryce Young, Kenny Pickett and Purdue quarterback Aidan O’connell, UT may have faced the four best quarterbacks in the nation this year combined with the best defense in UGA’s. Sure, there’s no excuse for losing to the Florida Gators, but it was in September, when UF only lost to Alabama by two points the week before and had the nation’s best rush offense.

Taking all this into account, tons of things were working against Tennessee football, and they didn’t just reach a bowl game Heupel’s first year on the job. They guaranteed themselves a winning record, something nobody saw coming.

Their winning record was guaranteed with a road win over a top 25 team, the Kentucky Wildcats, and another road win over a team that made a bowl, the Missouri Tigers. It may not seem like much, but overall, they navigated a ton of issues to finish 7-6 on the year, and that’s something nobody saw coming early on.

Remember, Heupel is the first head coach since Lane Kiffin to have a winning season his first year at UT. He did it with a lot more issues than Kiffin as well. Losing a close Music City Bowl game to a program that beat two top five teams this year should not undo that.

When you look at the future, there is even more reason to be excited. Tennessee football appears to have at least eight starters back on both sides of the ball, most notably Hendon Hooker coming back at quarterback, and that continuity should lead to a lot of success.

Also, the Vols’ first five games include two Group of Five foes, a Pitt team that lost everybody from this past year and Florida and LSU Tigers teams that have first-year head coaches. You could easily see a 5-0 start with this team. Keep all that in perspective. Don’t let a bowl loss outweigh it.