The Tennessee Vols are currently enjoying their most successful stretch of football since the late 1990s when Phillip Fulmer was at the helm.
Tennessee is 5-1 through the first six games of the 2024 season. It's the third straight season that the Vols have started 5-1.
The last time the Vols started 5-1 in three straight seasons was from 1997 to 1999.
Despite what you might hear from the national media , it's a great time to be a Tennessee football fan.
Josh Heupel hasn't been perfect as Tennessee's head coach, but he's been better than anyone expected. He's obviously the right guy for the Vols. That doesn't mean he's going undefeated anytime soon, but he has the Tennessee program on solid ground for the first time in two decades. He deserves every penny he's earning.
The worst thing that could happen to Tennessee right now would be Heupel leaving for another job.
Heupel seems incredibly happy in Knoxville, and he's created something special with the culture on Rocky Top, so it seems incredibly unlikely that he'd entertain the idea of leaving UT for another job.
There's one job, however, that could potentially come open that would create an uncomfortable scenario for Vols fans.
That's, of course, the Oklahoma job.
Current Sooners head coach Brent Venables is starting to feel the heat after a blowout loss to Texas this past weekend. Oklahoma is 4-2 this season with losses to the Longhorns and the Vols. With games remaining against South Carolina, Ole Miss, Missouri, Alabama, and LSU, it's possible that Oklahoma finishes the regular season as a six or seven win team.
Venables isn't officially on the hot seat just yet, but his seat is undoubtedly getting warm.
If Venables is gone after the 2024 season, it seems logical to expect Heupel to be one of Oklahoma's top targets.
Heupel, after all, has a long history with the Sooners. He led the program to a national championship as a player in 2000 before serving on Bob Stoops' coaching staff in Norman for nearly a decade. Heupel was fired by Stoops as the program's offensive coordinator after the 2014 season, which has led to some tension between Heupel and his alma mater.
Now, I'm not suggesting that Heupel will leave Tennessee for Oklahoma if he's offered the job in the event that Venables is fired. I have no idea what Heupel would do in that scenario. My feeling is that he'd probably say "no thanks" to an offer from Oklahoma. He's already been fired once by his alma mater, would he really want to go down that road again? I don't think so. Plus there's his connection to Tennessee athletic director Danny White. As long as White's in Knoxville, I don't think Heupel will have any desire to leave.
But for now, I don't think anyone can definitively answer what Heupel would or wouldn't do in that scenario. I don't even think Heupel could answer that right now. It's a lot different when it's a real scenario and not a hypothetical one (hypothetical answers to hypothetical questions aren't worth much).
This is a potential scenario that's always been lingering in the back of Vols fans' minds. And it's a scenario that could be in play much sooner than anyone anticipated. I don't think Tennessee fans should be too concerned right now, but they should at least brace themselves for this potentially becoming a major storyline if Venables gets canned by Oklahoma later this fall.
Related: The national media has it all wrong about the Tennessee and that's a major problem for the Vols
Local News
