Josh Heupel helped revitalize Oklahoma. He's doing the same at Tennessee

The first-year Oklahoma assistant coach had been tasked with finding a quarterback to spearhead the Sooners' offense under new head coach Bob Stoops and help turnaround a once proud football program on the heels of five-straight losing seasons.

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So Venables and fellow assistant Mike Stoops eyed Akili Smith, a junior college standout that at 6-foot-3, 220 pounds looked every bit the part of a program-changing quarterback. There was one problem: Mike Leach, Oklahoma's new offensive coordinator, who would ultimately have the final say, didn't want him.

Leach instead was focusing on another junior college player, who began his career at Weber State but had suffered an ACL tear that pushed him down the depth chart and eventually to Snow College in Utah.

Josh Heupel held an offer from Utah State before Leach invited him to Oklahoma's campus in Norman to throw in front of coaches. Venables could hardly believe it the first time he saw him.

"He was skinny and just frail, and it was the middle of winter," Venables said. "Just kind of pasty and the ball was coming out --- he was a southpaw, probably hadn't played in a couple of months --- and the ball was wobbly...We're like 'That ain't it.'"

Oklahoma offered and the Stoops had his cornerstone for a run of success that included a national championship and 10 conference titles over the next 17 years.

The Sooners' resurgence and Heupel's two-year stint as their starting quarterback go hand in hand. Oklahoma won seven games in Stoops' first season, a marked improvement from five games it won the year before.

The following season, the Sooners went unbeaten, capping a perfect 13-0 campaign with a BCS National Championship victory over Florida State--the program's first since 1985. Heupel passed for 3,392 yards and 20 touchdowns, finishing second in the Heisman Trophy voting.

On Saturday, he'll return to Norman as Tennessee's head coach, leading the sixth-ranked Vols who are seemingly poised for the College Football Playoff in Heupel's fourth season.

"There can’t be someone with a stronger legacy. A national championship, coach," Venables said. "Timing’s everything...He was a catalyst of that. And people won’t forget that."

Sooners' return to relevancy was costly for Heupel

Josh Heupel says you can still see the scars if you look close enough.

By the halfway point of Oklahoma's 2000 season, which at that point had come as a surprise nationally, Heupel's left arm was swelling. There times, Venables recalls, that it had ballooned to the size of a watermelon.

The Sooners were undefeated and already beaten No. 11 Texas, No. 2 Kansas State and No.1 Nebraska. Their 31-14 triumph over the Cornhuskers, the first in eight years in the series, propelled Oklahoma to the top of the polls.

The national title was in sight, but for the Sooners to get there, Heupel would have to play through the pain. He did.

"He spent the back-half of the year injured...The last probably five or six games," Venables said. "The way he managed that, his toughness really incredible."

Heupel, never one to talk about himself, downplayed it during his weekly speaking engagement on the SEC Coaches Teleconference Wednesday.

"There were a couple of other nicks and bruises, too that cause me some problems at the end of the year," Heupel said. "But, you know, that team in general, the ability for guys to be resilient and play through what ever they were going through is part of why we were able to go win a championship."

Heupel homecoming will be seen from new perspective

Josh Heupel will stand in a spot he's never stood before inside Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium Saturday night.

It will be a first, standing on the visitors sideline at a place where he starred as a quarterback and returned for an eight-year run as quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator.

"I'm not sure I've ever spent a day on the opposing sideline inside of that stadium," Heupel said. "It'll be different, but it's one I'm looking forward to."

Heupel's tenure as a coach at Oklahoma had a far more contentious end than the one enjoyed as a player. Stoops, his former coach and then-boss, relieved him of his coaching duties following a down year for the Sooners' offense in 2014.

Fourteen years after he revitalized Oklahoma, he did the same for his own coaching career, first at Utah State as an offensive coordinator and then Missouri. He took his first head coaching job at Central Florida in 2018 and after three seasons, was tasked with returning Tennessee to prominence after a decade-plus of dormancy.

In year four, the Vols (3-0) are yielding results the program hasn't seen in nearly 20 years and seemingly on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the era of an expanded playoff. That breakthrough, appropriately, could happen Saturday in Tennessee's first road test at No. 15 Oklahoma (3-0).

"I wouldn't change anything," Heupel said. "I'm fortunate and blessed to be here...have had an opportunity to meet so many great people along the way that have impacted me. But also, Oklahoma impacted me that way, too. From a player, the relationships that I got with teammates, fellow coaches as a coach and as a player, too.

"It was a great journey and I wouldn't be here without everything that happened at Oklahoma."

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