He's off to UCLA and there's a new projected starting quarterback in town. That's what's surely on the mind of Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel these days. Heupel has had a much busier spring than anyone could have ever imagined.
As you all know by now, Nico Iamaleava has left Tennessee for a return home to play for the UCLA Bruins. It's not news to say that a lot of people remain pretty ticked off with Nico for making this decision. However, Heupel is ready to move forward and put everything in the past, especially with Joey Aguilar being Knoxville-bound.
In a new interview this week, the Vols leader was asked about what happened with Iamaleava and how it has impacted his team. Heupel's response is one that continues to make a lot of people in Knoxville pretty darn happy:
Josh Heupel is confident Joey Aguilar will get the job done for Tennessee
"Well let's start calling it the Joey Aguilar situation," Heupel said with passion. "At the end of the day that's just the landscape (in college football). You're not going to keep everybody. You've got opportunities to put your roster together. I feel like we've got a team that's accountable, connected, works hard, competes hard and we're built to win. Now we've got to go earn it every single day. We've got some new pieces we've got to get onboarded here in May - that's the nature of college football. We'll get ready, keep competing and keep growing."
That's quite the message from Heupel. At the end of the day, as he's said multiple times over the last few weeks, there's no one bigger than the program. Iamaleava made the tough decision to leave town and play closer to home. We're not going to get into all of the drama surrounding NIL talks there.
Once he left the program, Heupel shifted his focus to finding someone else to run his offense and funny enough, a QB trade was posted with Aguilar signing with UT. He'll now have the chance to push for the starting job, though Jake Merklinger isn't just going to hand it over to him.
Once Aguilar gets to campus, he'll hit the ground running in learning the playbook and trying to build some chemistry with his receivers, of course including former 5-star signee Mike Matthews. The time is now for people to start backing Aguilar and Heupel is ready for him to prove a lot of his doubters wrong once the campaign gets here.