Tennessee football: Was Pitt Hendon Hooker’s Heisman launch? Monday awards suggest so.

All offseason, Tennessee football fans were pushing a dark-horse Heisman campaign for Hendon Hooker. In the first quarter of the Vols’ matchup at the Pittsburgh Panthers, that seemed lost, as Hooker had multiple misses. He also had two overthrows on easy touchdown passes.

However, after settling down, Hooker may have lived up to that billing. National experts are providing that hint. As we mentioned in our post about other players who should have received recognition from Saturday’s game, he was named SEC Offensive Player of the Week.

In addition to that, though, Hooker was named one of the Great 8 by the Davey O’Brien Award, which recognizes the best eight quarterbacks’ performances from the previous week. The Tennessee football quarterback’s placement on that list was revealed on Twitter.

So in Hooker’s first Power Five game of 2022, against a ranked team on the road, he earned every bit of quarterback recognition he could get. Given that fact, he may have launched his Heisman campaign, as this may be a sign of even greater things to come.

Hooker completed 27 of 42 passes for 325 yards and two touchdowns while rushing for 27 yards. He committed no turnovers in the process. Although he did get sacked three times, none of those sacks were his fault, and all the miscues in the second half by the offense were due to mistakes from somebody other than him.

When the time came, Hooker delivered. He rushed for a touchdown in overtime that was called back, and all he then did was throw a 28-yard touchdown pass to Cedric Tillman on the very next play. That ended up being the game-winner.

Of course, Tillman began his own quest for national recognition with nine catches for 162 yards and that score, but Hooker’s performance was exactly what Tennessee football fans expected out of him at the beginning of the year. As a result, the race is on.

Vegas seems to think so too. FanDuel and WynnBET have Hooker’s Heisman odds up to +4000.  That’s tied with three other people for sixth on FanDuel and with for 10th on WynnBET. All of a sudden, the dark-horse candidate is coming out into the open.

One of the questions surrounding the Vols in Heupel’s offense was what they could do against more elite defenses. A tradition of Heupel programs dating back to his days as the Missouri Tigers’ offensive coordinator was his teams padding stats in certain games.

UT did that last year against Mizzou, ironically, the South Carolina Gamecocks and the South Alabama Jaguars. They did have a good performance against the Kentucky Wildcats and Purdue Boilermakers, but both were after at least two weeks off, when Heupel also is at his best.

Performing like Hooker did Saturday, in spite of all the miscues, against a team that lives and dies with an effective pass rush, was definitely a huge step forward for him and the Vols’ offense. It’s enough to immediately start talking about the Heisman.

Ironically, it was the perfect game too, as it was the Johnny Majors Classic. In 1956, Majors became the first Vol in serious contention for the Heisman. Like Peyton Manning in 1997, he was a runner-up but should have won it. Hooker is chasing Manning’s records from 1997. Did he launch his Heisman year in a game honoring Majors?

Last year, despite losing, the Pitt game launched Hooker’s tenure as Tennessee football’s starting quarterback. He made two late mistakes to lose, but everybody could see he deserved the job. This year, it may have launched something even greater.