'The future is bright': Josh Heupel addresses speculation about the culture inside Vols locker room
NASHVILLE — Josh Heupel has a message to send when he sat down for his postgame press conference Saturday night at FirstBank Stadium in Nashville. The culture of his Tennessee football program is strong.
And there are no issues inside the locker room, no matter what some people outside the program may believe — or publicly talked about — over the last week.
“I know there’s been a lot of talk outside of our program,” Heupel said after No. 10 Tennessee’s 56-0 win over Vanderbilt, “just from different people, about what the culture is inside our locker room.
“When I got here two years ago nobody thought we’d win 10 by this point,” Heupel continued, “but there were 30-plus kids that left this program. This group chose to stay. They bought into me, they bought into our staff, they bought into the culture, the connection inside our locker room that we were going to build and they built it.
Josh Heupel: ‘The future is bright. I’ll go to battle with these guys any day, anywhere’
“They only did that by working hard, competing together and then competing for one another. We’ve been far from perfect, and that starts with me. I’ll tell you what, this group loves one another and that’s why we’ve turned this program in the right direction. The future is bright. I’ll go to battle with these guys any day, anywhere.”
The Vols (10-2, 6-2 SEC) missed their shot at the College Football Playoff after the 63-38 loss at South Carolina last week, but won 10 games in the regular season for the first time since 2003.
On Tuesday they dropped from No. 5 to No. 10 in the updated College Football Playoff Top 25, with ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit adding insult to injury by saying he was picking Vanderbilt to beat Tennessee in the regular-season finale.
“I’m claiming Vandy right now before you are even going to get close to that,” Herbstreit said.
Herbstreit cited Vanderbilt playing for bowl eligibility after back-to-back upsets of Kentucky and Florida. And the Vols suddenly having much less to play for after falling flat at South Carolina.
Kirk Herbstreit claimed Vols were ‘fighting amongst themselves in the locker room’
“Tennessee is not necessarily playing for bowl eligibility and their opportunity to get into the Playoff is gone,” Herbstreit said, “they’re fighting amongst themselves in the locker room, things are not good right now in Knoxville. Plus Hendon Hooker obviously has that injury. So I’ve got a weird feeling on Vandy this week.”
Joe Milton III started in place of Hooker, who tore his ACL in the fourth quarter at South Carolina, and completed 11 of 21 passes for 147 yards and a touchdown. Tennessee ran 31 times as a team for 362 yards and six touchdowns, with touchdown runs of 50, 52, 80 and 82 yards in the second half alone.
Heupel said yes, the culture of his program was tested after the loss to the Gamecocks. But it wasn’t anything more than that.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, “in the way that we were highly disappointed in how we played a week ago. How do you handle adversity man? It matters. This football team, like this program, has faced a ton of adversity in the last two and a half years. These kids have handled it the right way. That does not mean that we play perfect each week, obviously. But they handle adversity. They fight and they regroup and they come back.”
