In Josh Heupel's career, he has been the head coach in 68 total games.
Spanning between his time at Tennessee and UCF, he has been in the win column in 51 of these matches.
Heading into this Saturday, one thing was in common between all the victories. His dynamic offense scored more than 30 points in each win.
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However, win number 51 came on a 20-13 defensive affair with Texas A&M. This is by far the least amount of points the coach has scored while coming out on top in his six-year career.
Although this was uncharted territory for Heupel, he isn't complaining.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in one of these," said Heupel. "And I’m good with it. I like coming out on the right side of it. Obviously, offensively, want to be more efficient when we can be, but I’ve said it from when I got here, the expectation, the standard is to play elite defense here. Not just good defense. This is the home of Eric Berry, Al Wilson, Reggie White.
"The standard is to be elite and when I got here, we were devastated on the other side of the defense side of the football. Just with things that were outside of our control. We continued to build it. From scheme, understanding the scheme to recruiting guys, the depth on the defense side of the football. We’re just getting started as to what we will be on that side week in and week out but I love the performance of those guys tonight.”
For Tennessee, this effort started early. After giving up a touchdown on the first drive of the game, the only other points put on the board were in the form of two field goals.
By games end, the Vols had surrendered just 277 total yards with 54 coming on the ground. The last team to hold Texas A&M to this little rushing yards was LSU in 2021.
“You know, really the first drive, after that they played really pretty dialed in football, man," said Heupel. "Gap integrity, did a good job in the run game, got after the quarterback. The mixture of our coverages. We were in the right place at the right time. They hit a couple of play actions. But all in all, man, just the physicality, the effort, the strain and playing smart football. You put that together and it’s a great performance by those guys today. Man, great performance.”
A big reason for the defense's success was the ability to get after the quarterback.
Through designed blitzes and the four linemen getting to Max Johnson, he found himself constantly picking himself off the ground. Over the course of the night, the Vols' defense had racked up two sacks, five tackles for loss and 11 quarterback hurries.
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Helping lead this pass rush was James Pearce Jr. The sophomore was credited with a sack in the game after pushing an offensive lineman into Johnson. He would finish with a sack, two tackles for loss and five quarterback hurries.
This now moves his mark to six sacks and nine tackles for loss on the season.
“James is a great football player," said Heupel. "He’s still not anywhere near what he’s going to be. He’s going to continue to get better. He needs to continue to get better every week but he’s starting to mature and be the same competitor. Relentless every single rep. But it’s all of those guys together. There’s not just one guy that you can slide, you can chip. It’s all of those guys up front operating and functioning as one. If it’s just one, you can do things from a protection standpoint to try to limit a guy. It’s all of those guys competing in the way that they did. He had a great game, but man, everybody that stepped up there looked like they competed extremely hard tonight.”
This dialed up blitz from Heupel and his defense puts a lot of stress on the defensive backs, though. If linebackers and even defensive backs are assigned to fire through the line, then less help is there on the back end.
Outside of some gains on third downs, the secondary held tight, though. They typically stayed solid enough to not give Johnson options as he escaped pressure.
This included coming up with two big interceptions on the final two drives of the game for the Aggies.
“We give up a couple plays, play action, you know there’s a third and 15, 17 that we give up," said Heupel "There’s things that can be better at the same time. I thought all in all, we played really well tonight. We matched things out. We passed things off in our zone and the combination between the first level defensive line, our second level drops and third level we were able to get off the football field and have the type of performance that we did tonight.”
Next, Tennessee heads to Tuscaloosa to face Alabama. It'll need a similar performance to take down the Tide for the second year in a row.
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