With spring practice in the rearview mirror, I’m going around the country to write about a couple of different teams in each conference that are most interesting to me right now.

We’ll start in the SEC, where the Oklahoma Sooners and the Florida Gators are the two most interesting teams in the conference this season.

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This time last year, much of the preseason conversation about the Gators and the Sooners revolved around three things: 1) Both had the toughest schedule in all of college football, 2) Both head coaches were on the hot seat, and 3) Both had the potential to make the College Football Playoff. The Sooners made the CFP, while the Gators crashed and burned, fired their head football coach, Billy Napier, and lost former five-star recruit quarterback DJ Lagway to the transfer portal.

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Enter Jon Sumrall, the new head football coach at Florida. Like Brent Venables at Oklahoma, he, too, made the CFP last season with his Tulane squad that won the AAC and 11 games overall. Across his four seasons as a head coach at Troy and Tulane, he’s 43-12. He’s never lost more than one conference game in any of those four seasons. Interestingly enough, Napier also arrived in Gainesville with four years of head coaching experience and a nearly identical record at 40-12. Will things be different for Sumrall in Gator Country?

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His coordinator hires were a good start, on both sides of the ball. With Kentucky moving on from Mike Stoops, longtime defensive coordinator Brad White, with whom Sumrall was co-DC in 2021 in Lexington, became available. Together, White and Sumrall coached a Kentucky defense that finished 26th in all of FBS in scoring defense and 4th in the SEC. The Gators have finished inside the top-10 in the SEC in scoring defense once since the start of the 2021 season, and it was 10th in 2022. On offense, stealing Buster Faulkner away from The Flats could prove to be one of the best coordinator hires of the offseason in all of college football. Former Georgia Tech quarterback Haynes King flourished under the former Parkview star quarterback’s tutelage. If Georgia Tech transfer quarterback Aaron Philo can come close to replicating what King did, just on the ground, where the Jackets were 8th in FBS in yards per carry, the combination of the former Prince Avenue Christian star and Jadan Baugh could be devastating for opposing defenses.

For Oklahoma, the Sooners made the CFP last season. They beat Josh Heupel and Tennessee inside Neyland Stadium. They beat Alabama again, this time on the road in the regular season. (Although they did lose to the Crimson Tide in their CFP rematch in Norman a month later.) Brent Venables led a defense that ranked first in the SEC and fifth nationally in DFEI, per BCFToys. The problem, though, was that while the Sooners’ defense was championship-esque, the offense was nowhere close. Oklahoma was 117th in rushing yards per game last year. They were 84th in points scored per offensive drive, per BCFToys. In November, the Sooners were 91st in passing yards per game. The stark contrast between Venables’ defense and first-year Oklahoma offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle’s offense was plainly evident week in and week out. And yet, they still won double-digit games and hosted a CFP game.

All eyes will be on John Mateer because all eyes are always on the quarterback. We all get it, but part of the reason Mateer and that Sooners’ offense a year ago was hamstrung in the passing game was injuries, yes, which has been the case the last two years in Norman, but also Deion Burks going scoreless between Game 3 and Game 11. Mateer’s favorite target, Isaiah Sategna, is back and pushed for 1,000 yards receiving last year. Around him, the Sooners added Trell Harris from Virginia and Parker Livingstone from Texas. The latter was extremely productive and available in Austin a season ago. The former had two games in which he went over 140 yards receiving and was a chunk-play assassin for a Virginia team that won double-digit games and reached the ACC championship. Surrounding Sategna with Harris and Livingstone may not be the flashiest wide receiver trio in the SEC. Still, it could be one of the safest in the production department, which is ultimately all that matters anyway.

Whether it’s Philo or Tramell Jones Jr. under center at Florida, they’ll have talent out wide to work with, too. Similar to Oklahoma, there is just a whole lot to like in the top three with Eric Singleton Jr., Dallas Wilson, and Vernell Brown III. Singleton Jr. has two years of proven production in Faulkner’s system, dating back to his days at Georgia Tech. Brown III flashed as a YAC machine last year, too. Wilson has the highest upside of the group as a former five-star wideout. In his four games played last year, Wilson reeled in three touchdowns. He nabbed two and accumulated 111 yards and six receptions in the Gators’ win over Texas. He’s got to stay healthy, but like Oklahoma, the wideout trio in Gainesville has a lot to like.

What also works in both schools’ favor, outside of a more manageable schedule than a year ago, is that both are flying under the radar a bit in the SEC. For Oklahoma, its arch-rival Texas, is all-in once again, and all eyes are on Steve Sarkisian’s team in Austin. That’s where you want to be if you’re Venables and the Sooners in Mid-May. For Florida, LSU is the school with the new head coach and sky-high expectations.

The Gators had those expectations coming into last year. Sumrall is in a great spot to overachieve and flash a bright future in Gainesville, particularly with Philo and Baugh on the ground and a much-improved defense. Sumrall starting off his Florida tenure with its 2026 football schedule rather than its 2025 football schedule could also prove to be one of the more important first-year developments in the SEC. The path to eight or nine wins is there for the Gators.

The path to nine or ten wins is there for the Sooners, if they can survive a brutal September. They get Texas coming out of a bye week, and the Sooners have the kind of schedule where it could go on a run from Mid-October onward.

It might not all happen for the Gators and the Sooners this season, but it could, and it makes them two of the most interesting teams in the SEC.

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Enter in-state conference rival Virginia Tech and James Franklin.

The Hokies received a major jolt this offseason when the school hired former Penn State and Vanderbilt head football coach James Franklin. The Cavaliers won 11 games last season, and the Hokies haven’t won 11 games in 15 years. Franklin won 11 games six times during his tenure at Penn State. In my lifetime, the Hokies have finished the season with double-digit wins 14 times. What Elliott did at Virginia in 2025 was what so many college football fans around my age grew up routinely expecting out of Virginia Tech year after year. What Elliott accomplished at Virginia in 2025 was what every Penn State fan expected out of Franklin every season in Happy Valley. Something has to give in 2026 and beyond, though, as the Cavaliers and the Hokies have never won double-digit games in the same season. With Elliott and Franklin now leading these two rival in-state programs, combined with the ACC's openness outside of Miami, it has never felt more possible.

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But there are a lot of questions for Elliott’s Cavaliers in Year 5 and Franklin’s Hokies in Year 1. It starts at quarterback, where Virginia has to replace Chandler Morris with either Pittsburgh transfer Eli Holstein or Missouri and Penn State transfer Beau Pribula, and where Virginia Tech has to replace Kyron Drones with either Penn State transfer Ethan Grunkemeyer or North Carolina transfer Bryce Baker. If Pribula beats out Holstein and Grunkemeyer beats out Baker, both schools will be led by former Penn State backup quarterbacks this fall. However, the experience in the Cavaliers’ room is very different than the experience in the Hokies’ room. With Elliott’s team, he won 11 games last season and is trying to keep the momentum going with a veteran quarterback like Pribula or Holstein. With Franklin’s team, he is trying to build momentum with an unproven but talented former blue-chip recruit like Grunkemeyer or Baker.

It’s all incredibly fascinating at quarterback for the Cavaliers and Hokies in 2026.

Even with the two rival in-state schools coming off very different seasons, their projected win totals are separated by only one game in next season, per FanDuel. Virginia’s projected win total sits at 7.5 while Virginia Tech’s sits at 6.5. It’s not inconceivable that when these two schools meet on November 28th in Blacksburg, the Cavaliers and the Hokies will have identical records. Wouldn’t it be something for the first year of Elliott versus Franklin rivalry to feature those kinds of stakes, where the winner in Blacksburg finishes the regular season with the better record?

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Elliott broke through in Charlottesville in Year 4, where he doubled his win total from 5 to 11. In an open ACC outside of Miami, it will be fascinating to see how the former longtime Clemson assistant builds off last season’s rousing success. Back-to-back double-digit win seasons are obviously the goal, but with the potential drop-off at quarterback from Morris to either Pribula or Holstein, 8-4 would be a very nice follow-up to last season’s magic, right? In a lot of ways, it seemed like the 2025 ACC Coach of the Year overachieved with his group last year. The Cavaliers were 53rd in OFEI, per BCFToys. They were seventh in scoring offense in the ACC. They weren’t elite at throwing the football, and they weren’t elite at running the football. The best numbers were found on the defensive side of the ball, where Virginia and CFP runner-up Miami were the only two teams to allow fewer than 20 points per game in the ACC last season. It’s fair to be concerned about QB1 at Virginia, but to win eight or more games in 2026, a lot of it might depend on whether or not the Cavaliers’ defense is one of the premier units in the conference once again.

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Both Elliott and Franklin were offensive assistant coaches before they were head coaches. However, the in-state battle between Virginia defensive coordinator John Rudzinski and Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Brent Pry will be just as intriguing. The two ACC schools that finished No. 1 and No. 2 in scoring defense in the conference last season won double-digit games. Virginia Tech’s best finish since 2020 was 5th in 2021. Under Franklin in Happy Valley, the Nittany Lions were 8th nationally in scoring defense in 2024. They were third the year prior. They were 9th the year before that. It was the defense over the last several years at Penn State that raised the school’s floor so consistently year over year.

Yes, the offense and quarterback matters at Virginia and Virginia Tech this year and beyond, but I suspect who wins more games between the two head coaches will have a lot more to do with their scoring defense than with their scoring offense.

I don’t know how it will all play out for Elliott and Franklin in Charlottesville and Blacksburg, respectively, but I do know it will be quite enjoyable to see how it all unfolds. Does Elliott keep things on track at Virginia in Year 5? Does Franklin come in and win immediately, even with a far more daunting schedule, in Year 1? Does Pribula or Holstein become a cool Bounce Back Season story? Does Grunkemeyer flash as a future first-round talent in the NFL Draft? I don’t know, but I do know the Virginia vs. Virginia Tech game in late November will be a must-watch event for the first time in a long time, and that’s a great thing for fans of both schools and college football fans as a whole.

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This week, Sports Renaissance Man had the opportunity to interview Alabama State head football coach Eddie Robinson Jr.

Read the full interview below.

The biggest reason your team had such a special season and went from 7 to 10 wins?

Robinson Jr: Well, I think it was definitely our offensive production. We went from 22 points per game to 40. So that’s probably the most obvious choice, and to have some explosive guys. Of course, you have to start with Andrew Body. He was the HBCU Player of the Year, so that was a big part of it. The offensive line played a lot better as well, but I just think, just overall, from an offensive standpoint, we executed at a high level, and we had some explosive guys.

How do you manage expectations from the fanbase now that you just won double-digit games the previous season?

Robinson Jr: Well, I don’t think you manage outside the room. You manage inside the room. And I think for us, you know, our expectation has been to win at a high level every year. So we expect it. We know the challenges that are involved to make it happen. You know, every win is a big deal. In college football, I tell my guys, half the teams in college football lost this weekend. So when you win, I don’t care who you’re playing. It’s something to appreciate and enjoy. And then on Sunday, you get back to work. So we have a motto about winning today. And so we just focus on winning each day, just getting like marginal gains, getting a little better every day at something. And I think if we keep having that approach, then at the end of the year, you look back and say, ‘Hey, this is what we accomplished.’ And for us, we focus on that. And then, you know, outside the building, the fans should expect to win a championship every year. I mean, that’s the expectation of what fans are. They’re fanatical. They’re supposed to expect to win, right? And it’s our job to deliver that.

What gets you most fired up about spring practice leading a program in 2026?

Robison Jr: I think you can be physical because you don’t play for another six months, and so the guys can really hit. Like, we can watch the guys tackle, and I’m trying to find the guys who are physical, who are tough, some violent guys, who can make people miss, and who can make tackles, who can make throws and catches under pressure. And we still kind of control it a little bit, but we won’t be this physical and violent once the season starts, OK. And so for right now, you can really kind of let them go and practice really hard and have some big collisions and contacts. And then, you knock on wood. You don’t want anybody to get hurt, but you know, to make a good omelet, you've got to break some eggs. So it’s just how it goes.

Does it change with the portal season and everything else? Do you change your install schedule here in this new age of college football? Or has it still been just about what it was when you first got there?

Robinson Jr: I think it’s about the same. I think without having a portal window this spring, it definitely helps us out just from a standpoint of, yeah, maybe a couple guys that you’re hoping to still bring into the program, you’re always recruiting. But at the same time, you’re not spending a whole lot of time concerned about, ‘Hey, this kid is having a great spring, will he try to take this tape and leave?’ You know, and I think that was the part that was just really crazy the last couple of years, when guys are going through spring, and I’m uncertain whether or not they’re going to stay. So now I can’t even really plan for next year because, yeah, I look really good at the defensive end spot, but I don’t know if two of those guys in their mind, they’re thinking that they’re going to leave, and they haven’t told me yet.

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Your offense led the SWAC in scoring last season, but was last in total plays in the SWAC. Was that kind of efficiency mostly due to the consistent chunk plays your offense produced?

Robison Jr: Well, I think it was two things. So I’m always looking at the different stats, comparing year to year, comparing with the conference champ and the top-25 teams in FCS did the year before, and what makes a successful team just from a stats standpoint, because you want to try to mimic those things. So I think more specifically for us, I don’t think of the intention, like every play you’re trying to score, right? But we had some very explosive guys who were taking a normal play and making two guys miss and going 30, 40, and 50 yards, and sometimes scoring. So that’s a good problem to have. So I don’t think you ever scale back from how fast we can score. I think the other part of that equation was that we were horrible in third-down efficiency. We were close to last in the conference. We gave up more than 50% on third down and fourth down. And so what was happening was we were scoring really fast, but then we couldn’t get off the field on third down defensively to get the ball back to the offense. So it was, it was, the success on offense, and I think the lack of being productive in third-down efficiency on defense. And so we understand what we have to be better at. You can be better on third down. And, of course, you want to still be explosive. But we always have a mindset of tempo and controlling the clock and those types of things. But I think that third-down efficiency on defense will allow the offense to have more opportunities to score, and hopefully, we can be just as efficient as we were last year.

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What’s the secret to improved third-down defensive efficiency?

Robinson Jr: First of all, you've got to know it’s third down. It sounds like a simple thing. So what we’re doing now, we’re getting into spring, we’re doing situational football. And the kids know my favorite day of the week during the season is Thursday because we really focus on situational football. You focus on two-minute, you focus on third downs, you focus on red zones. So now it’s more specific, we’re not just running plays 1st and 10 from the 30. We’re looking at, hey, it’s 3rd and 3, it’s 3rd and 5, it’s 3rd and 7. And so it sounds like an easy deal, but everybody on the team, especially guys on the field, have to know, ‘Hey, it’s 3rd and 3.’ And so the way you’re going to play cornerback or linebacker at 3rd and 3 is different between 3rd and 9 or 3rd and 10. So once you know the down the distance, then you can start getting to what’s the formation, anticipating the play, what’s my responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. Third down is my favorite down. That’s the money down. But then you have to execute once you get them into 3rd and long, and then you have to get them off the field. And I think the trend in college football is now to go for it on fourth down. So now we’re really having that mentality of if it’s 3rd and 9, we know if it gets to a 4th and 2 or 3, most offensive coordinators are going to go for it. That’s what happened against us. So we’re kind of preparing the kids. So we’re doing a lot of third and fourth down type things now, so we can be in that mindset of we’re going to have to stop an offense on third and fourth down.

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What’s next for Andrew Body’s development after such a dominant 2025 season?

Robinson Jr: Yeah, I tell him all the time. I mean, you can’t be a running quarterback. You have to be a quarterback who can run, and it’s a big difference. And so, and I tell them, you look at, you know, some of the guys, I go way back, not way back, but I played against them, so I don’t want to say I’m that old, but, you know, Johnny Five, you know, Donovan McNabb, you know, he was one of those guys who could run, but he ran on his terms. Even Mahomes, you know, Mahomes can run, but he’s not a running quarterback per se. And so I think for me, ultimately, you have to win in the pocket from the quarterback position, or you have to get out of the pocket, but eyes downfield to try to make explosive plays. But then, when you have to run, man, you can really punish the defense. So I think just going through that first, second, and third read, getting the ball out to the check down, like, be the point guard. And then when it’s time to take over, you take over when it’s necessary. But don’t force it. Let the game come to you.

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Thinking back to Year 1 as the head football coach at Alabama State to now, going into Year 5, how have you evolved as a leader and coach?

Robinson Jr: Yeah, so I think now I say what needs to be said, and I do what needs to be done. And so I think a simple way to look at that is like we had a practice. It was raining that morning. It was really one of those early spring mornings. It was really, really cold, and it was raining hard, so the team is anticipating and the coaches that practice will be canceled. But with me looking at my trusty weather app, I understand that the weather is about to clear up at 6:30, so we’ll be perfectly fine. So I’m getting in the car in the mindset of it’s going to be a cold, wet, rainy day, ready to practice, and I think everybody else had the mindset of practice will be cancelled, right? So, going through the first 20 minutes, you know I usually take my notes on the things I need to correct at the end of practice. I had five things in the first 20 minutes. I was like this is going nowhere fast. This is about to be a wasted day, and I think in my first year, I probably would have asked another coach, ‘Hey man, how do you think this is going, man? What do you think we need to do to get it going?’ I would have asked permission to be the head football coach. Well, this year I brought everybody up to the 50. A couple of expletives. ‘Like, hey, we’re going to, this thing is horrible. We’re going to start this practice over. I don’t like this tempo. This is not championship tempo. Even though it’s in the spring and we don’t play for six months, this is not a good practice. So let’s get it changed right now.’ And then it went on to be a pretty good practice. So, you know, right now I’m going to be more, I’m going to trust my instinct. I’m going to go with my gut. And maybe I’m wrong sometimes, but as the head coach, you get the right to be wrong. So it’s like, it’s one of those things I’m going to trust what I feel and not always ask permission. I think my first year, I probably would have asked permission to kind of have that same type of, you know, response.

Do you have a take on the Titans’ new uniforms?

Robinson Jr: You know, I’m going to reach out to my guy, Keith Bullock, and talk with him. He came and talked to our team last year. You know, I started off as a Houston Oiler. I was on the team with, you know, Warren Moon and all those guys. Ernest Givins, you know, Haywood Jeffires, all those guys. I mean, I’m a true-blue Houston Oiler, right? So, part of me loves the Columbia blue and red. That’s like, it’s like, man. And so, but part of me still likes the old Titan logo. So, to answer your question, I do like it because it merges both aspects of it. I think it... kind of gives that connection because there is still a lot of Oilers fans in Texas who still follow the Titans because they still have that connection because all of the franchise records, you know, the Robert Braziles, the Earl Campbells, the Warren Moons, they’re still with the Titans franchise, even though they were Oilers. So I think I love the connection of the Columbia blue and red to kind of tie those old guys in and I still go back when I’m able to when we have the reunion days, I still go back to Nashville for the reunion days because for the Oilers, it’s still and my old Oiler friends they show up for that and my Titans guys, so I like it. I’m thumbs up with it.

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Texas Tech football and Ohio State football have something in common right now. For the latter, winning lots of regular-season games has been the standard. The Buckeyes have lost more than one conference game just once since the start of the 2012 season. Since 2005, Ohio State has failed to win double-digit games twice. Of those two seasons, one was the COVID-shortened season. Funny enough, the one year the Buckeyes lost more than one Big Ten game for the first time in 2011, head football coach Ryan Day’s football team won the national championship. Last year, Ohio State went 8-0 vs. Big Ten teams, and they won by two or more scores in every single game. Last year, Texas Tech went 8-1 vs. Big 12 teams, and they won by two or more scores in every victory. Red Raiders fans are now in a shared place with Buckeyes fans when it comes to the college football regular season.

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Could you imagine telling college football fans in 2006 that Texas Tech was on a path to being just as consistently dominant in their conference as Ohio State has been in the Big Ten? If you take a look at the 2026 college football win total projections, you will find that Texas Tech’s projected win total sits at 11.5, which is what it has felt like at Ohio State for years and years. (Although the Buckeyes have an eyebrow-raising 9.5 win total this year. Traveling to Austin for your season opener can have that kind of effect, I suppose.) Texas Tech’s one blemish in conference play last year came on the road in Tempe against the Arizona State Sun Devils. This year, they get Kenny Dillingham’s team at home. BYU isn’t on their schedule next season. It would be a huge upset for the Red Raiders not to be favored in every game they play this upcoming season.

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It certainly seems like this is the new standard for Texas Tech. The Red Raiders were ranked No. 1 by On3 in their team transfer portal rankings last year. They were ranked No. 2 this latest cycle. Their big get last cycle was former Stanford edge David Bailey, and he had a fantastic lone season in Lubbock and projects to be a top-10 pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. This cycle, you could argue it’s former Cincinnati quarterback Brendan Sorsby. You could argue it’s former Wake Forest defensive tackle Mateen Ibirogba or former Kansas State linebacker Justin Romine. Only time will tell, but the Red Raiders are rolling in a way similar to the Buckeyes, where it would be jarring to see Texas Tech not win double-digit games at the end of the season. Texas Tech fans are starting to experience the regular season like Ohio State fans have experienced it for decades now, where you expect to win just about every regular-season game you play. You know your team has more talent, more years than not, in your conference.

How soon before SEC fans start to view Texas Tech the way they have viewed Ohio State for years and years? The strength-of-schedule conversation isn’t going anywhere, especially with the SEC going to nine conference games this year. If Texas Tech finishes a perfect 12-0 this season and becomes a yearly lock to make the College Football Playoff, how does that change the conversation around them? In my 34 years on this planet, the Red Raiders have always seemed like one of the fun underdogs in the sport. That’s not who they are anymore, though. While it is impossible to know for sure how they’d fare in the SEC, the same as with Ohio State, it is going to be interesting to see how they are viewed by fanbases in SEC Country, particularly if they don’t make a deep run in the CFP sooner rather than later.

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If you’re an Arkansas football fan, you’re a bit jealous, right? You don’t have to squint too hard to envision an alternate world where you’re doing what Texas Tech is doing in the Big 12. A perfect world for Razorbacks fans is one where they remain in the SEC for every sport except football, right? The Hawgs have never won the SEC and don’t look to be particularly close to winning it in the not-too-distant future. A far more appealing future would be battling the Red Raiders atop the Big 12 every year and going to the CFP more years than not, right? Texas Tech is the kind of powerhouse in the Big 12 that Arkansas could be if it made the switch, right?

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For Ohio State fans, the high floor must be the best part of watching your beloved Buckeyes over the years, right? In the FBS, you can count on one hand the schools that have similar year-over-year floors to Day’s team. It includes Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs. It used to include Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide. It seems to include Marcus Freeman’s Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Dan Lanning’s Oregon Ducks. Tennessee fans have enjoyed the consistent high floors that Josh Heupel has created in Big Orange Country over the last half-decade.

This is a new world for Red Raiders fans, where they’re the school with the highest floor in their Power 4 conference more years than not. They are now a school where it’s expected that they win double-digit games every year. It’s a school where a 9-3 finish is a colossal failure. The Buckeyes have lived in this world for a long time, but look out, the Red Raiders are here now, too.

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So, which fanbases should be excited about these early odds? Which fanbases should be concerned? Which fanbases, honestly, should have no idea what to think?

Let’s dive in.

Who Should Be Excited?

Let’s start positively. Tennessee fans should be excited that their win total is up to 7.5 from 6.5, where it was when the projections came out a few days ago. With a redshirt freshman or true freshman under center, I’ve long maintained this offseason that the goal, or hope rather, is eight wins for the Volunteers. Young quarterback, new defensive coordinator, new strength & conditioning coach, thirty-plus true freshmen, compounded with nine conference games and a real road test at Bobby Dodd Stadium against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. If the Vols reach nine wins, Tennessee head football coach Josh Heupel is your Coach of the Year in the SEC. If the Vols reach eight wins, I suspect it will look and feel very different than Tennessee’s eight wins last season.

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Another school with a projected win total of 7.5 is Florida. If you are a Gators fan, you should be really excited about that number. Florida, Auburn, LSU, Arkansas, Ole Miss, and Kentucky all will have new head football coaches this fall, and only the Bayou Bengals go into next fall with a higher projected win total than the Gators at 8.5.

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Florida was able to pry Jon Sumrall away from Tulane, where he went 20-8 and made the College Football Playoff last season. Across his four seasons as a head football coach in the FBS, Sumrall has gone 7-1 in conference play every year. He’s won at multiple stops, has played in this conference at Kentucky, where he was the Wildcats’ leading tackler in 2004, and hired a heck of a staff around him. Buster Faulkner as offensive coordinator and Brad White as defensive coordinator is a strong duo, particularly the former.

The Gators retaining star tailback Jadan Baugh could prove to be a huge offseason win for Sumrall’s staff, with the Jackets under Faulkner sitting in the top-10 in yards per carry on the ground in two of the last three seasons, per CFBStats. Like Tennessee, the Gators have a true quarterback competition on their hands between Aaron Philo, who followed Faulkner from Atlanta, and roster holdover Tramell Jones Jr, a Jacksonville native. Whoever wins the QB1 battle will have a star tailback behind him and a litany of playmakers out wide to throw the ball to in Dallas Wilson, Vernell Brown III, and Eric Singleton Jr.

Outside of Kiffin at LSU, no fanbase that hired a new coach this offseason in the SEC should be more excited than Florida fans.

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Who Should Be Concerned?

This will probably be a yearly deal for Kalen DeBoer, unfortunately. Even if he wins a championship at Alabama this year or next, the pressure never ceases at a place like Alabama. That’s both a blessing and a curse for the head football coach and the fans. Georgia and Texas are tied atop the win-total projections at 9.5 wins. Alabama is right below them, tied with Texas A&M and LSU. Those five schools should be the favorites to make the CFP this season out of the conference. If you're a Bulldog fan, you feel the best out of this group, but if you’re a Crimson Tide fan, you’re already a little anxious about next season.

You would like to be at the 9.5 win total where the Longhorns sit alongside the Bulldogs. You missed the CFP last season, and there is all sorts of pressure in Tuscaloosa for that not to happen in back-to-back seasons. However, Ryan Grubb is back for Year 2 as offensive coordinator, so that continuity should help on the offensive side of the ball. It’s unlikely the Tide could run the ball any worse than they did a year ago. Ryan Coleman-Williams, Lotzeir Brooks, and Rico Scott at wideout have lots of potential with two young, blue-chip wildcards behind them in Derek Meadows and Cederian Morgan.

Like Tennessee and Florida, there is a real quarterback competition happening in Tuscaloosa. The floor for the Tide is safer than the Vols or the Gators if the wrong quarterback wins the job to start the season, but if you’re a fan of the Tide, you hope the right guy wins and runs with it, whether that’s Austin Mack or Keelon Russell. While the latter is still just a redshirt freshman, the CFP expectations will remain whether he or Mack wins the competition. If Alabama bests its projected win total in March, that still may not be enough to reach the CFP at 9-3. It’s a march to double-digit wins, with a new quarterback and a nine-game conference schedule that includes trips to Knoxville, Baton Rouge, and Nashville, along with Georgia and Texas A&M coming to town.

Who Should Have No Idea What To Think?

Several schools fit the bill here: LSU, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, and Vanderbilt.

For the Tigers, 8.5 is a nice first-year number for Kiffin, but the school also just brought in the No. 1-ranked transfer portal class, highlighted by a big-time, win-now quarterback in Arizona State transfer quarterback Sam Leavitt. In four of Kiffin’s final five years in Oxford, he won double-digit games every season except one. With more talent in Baton Rouge, you feel great, but it’s still Year 1, and you aren’t sure what the fairest expectations are for Kiffin this fall. It’s probably just make the 12-team field, something LSU has not done yet, and go from there.

Assuming star quarterback Trinidad Chambliss is under center for the Rebels, 7.5 seems awfully low. Sure, Kiffin is gone, and Pete Golding is in. The latter was awesome in the CFP under brutal circumstances, but Ole Miss will have a different offensive coordinator with John David Baker coming in from East Carolina. Like Kiffin and LSU, the Rebels reeled in another elite transfer portal class on paper. How Syracuse transfer wideouts Darrell Gill Jr. and Johntay Cook come in, and mesh matters a great deal, and you still have five-star, in-state product Caleb Cunningham waiting in the wings behind Deuce Alexander.

Oklahoma broke through and made the CFP with arguably the toughest schedule in all of college football last year. Heisman hopeful John Mateer is back. And yet, Sooners fans see their win total at 7.5, alongside the Gators and the Vols. The Sooners were 79th in offense last season in scoring. Ben Arbuckle is back for his second season in Norman. The passing game in particular has to have more juice if the Sooners are going to hit the over and expect to win multiple games in the CFP. Isaiah Sategna III is back as Mateer’s safety net, and transfers Trell Harris and Parker Livingstone need to be plug-and-play guys right away.

The defense finished 7th in scoring defense last year, and under Brent Venables calling the shots, it’s hard to see a major drop-off there, so their floor is high. The offense has to click across the board a lot better, so OU is in one of the stranger spots in the conference.

Finally, the Vanderbilt Commodores. They won double-digit games last season, led by a quarterback who probably deserved the Heisman. Even though they missed the CFP, Vandy fans watched their school trounce the Volunteers in Neyland. They beat LSU and Missouri at home. They trounced South Carolina and Kentucky. They fell to the Longhorns on the road by three. A whole lot went right for Clark Lea’s team in Nashville last year.

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Now, Diego Pavia is out, and true freshman Jared Curtis is in. Across the state, rival Tennessee is dealing with the same dramatic shift, going from Joey Aguilar to either George MacIntyre or Faizon Brandon. Like Tennessee, though, there is a belief in the ‘Dores with a young quarterback under center. You should feel good about the 6.5 if you’re a Vanderbilt fan, but you have to wonder what the offense will look like with such a dramatic change from Pavia to Curtis, even with offensive coordinator Tim Beck back. It’s already going to be weird to see Curtis in black-and-gold after being a longtime Georgia commit the Commodores flipped late in the process, but how will last year’s success and offensive dominance shape Vanderbilt fans’ likely up-and-down nature of this year’s team?

I can’t wait to watch how it all plays out, in, well, six months.

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This season, the North Dakota State Bison will play in the Mountain West Conference. A wild sentence to both write and, for longtime college football fans reading this, to read, too. Indeed, the longtime FCS juggernauts, winners of 10 FCS titles since 2011, are the latest storied program to move up from the FCS ranks into the FBS. It’s a new challenge for the Bison, and it will be interesting to see how head football coach Tim Polasek guides his team into uncharted waters next season at the next level. However, you may have missed another storied FCS program, the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens, winners of six titles at the FCS & Division-II level, made this same leap to FBS last season. In his fourth season as the head football coach at his alma mater, Ryan Carty led the Fightin’ Blue Hens to seven wins and a 68 Ventures Bowl victory over Louisiana.

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The Delaware football program has been mighty successful for a long time now. Carty is 33-17 in his four seasons, which includes two nine-win seasons back-to-back in 2023 and 2024. Temple head football coach K.C. Keeler was a longtime coach and former player at Delaware and won the 2003 FCS national championship over then-undefeated Colgate, 40-0, at Finley Stadium in Chattanooga. Overall, Keeler went 86-52 as the head man of the Fightin’ Blue Hens. Before Keeler, legendary Delaware coach Tubby Raymond won 300 games and three national championships. In between Keeler and Carty, the Fightin’ Blue Hens wandered the wilderness a bit, going 40-46 across those nine seasons.

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Under Carty, Delaware football is rolling again. It’s easy to forget that even though Keeler went 15-1 and won a national championship in 2003, where Carty was the backup quarterback, he only won nine or more games one other time in his first five seasons in Newark. Carty has averaged eight wins a season over his first four. Keeler averaged eight wins a season over his first five seasons as well. The Keeler-Carty Connection has proven time and time again to be a consistent winner at Delaware.

One of the major reasons for the Fightin’ Blue Hens’ success in their first season in FBS stemmed from their lethal passing attack. Delaware passed for 293 yards per game, good for sixth in all of FBS. To put that into context, Josh Heupel’s electric passing attack with Joey Aguilar in 2025 was one spot ahead of Carty’s Blue Hens. There were only seven teams in the FBS that attempted more than 40 passes per game, and the Fightin’ Blue Hens were one of them.

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How have the Fightin’ Blue Hens been such a thorn in the side for opposing defenses through the air?

“It’s been something we’ve always been able to do successfully,” Carty told me in an interview on Thursday afternoon. “I think we’ve always been one of the better passing teams in the country. I think it’s just a product of what the scheme looks like and the variety of it. It’s also how we recruit the right people.”

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It also has to do with the quarterback play under Carty, a former quarterback himself. You’re not going to have a prolific passing attack without a prolific passing quarterback.

Carty noted that one of the perhaps more overlooked aspects of Delaware’s success through the air is the amount of time his quarterbacks who play for him have spent in his system. “It’s been a long time since I played somebody who was a true freshman or a true transfer right away. It matters in our system. It does. You’re going to be better when you’ve been in it for a little bit because there’s so much nuance and there’s so much install. We do drop back [to] pass more than most teams in the country. It’s not just an RPO operation or a quick-game operation. It’s mainly drop-back pass, and we run Four Verticals a lot. We do things some other teams don’t do as much.”

That prolific offense was on full display early in the 2025-26 season for Delaware when the Fightin’ Blue Hens stunned the Connecticut Huskies and Jim Mora at home in their third game as an FBS program. Led by quarterback Nick Minicucci, in his third season at Delaware under Carty, threw all over the Huskies for an efficient final line of 23-for-34, 265 yards, one touchdown, and no interceptions. Best of all, Minicucci won the game for the Fightin’ Blue Hens in overtime with a quarterback scamper that went for six in walk-off fashion.

Minicucci finished sixth in FBS in total passing yards last season and threw for 250-plus yards in 10 of Delaware’s thirteen ball games. The Fightin’ Blue Hens played in six games decided by one score or less and went 4-2. So Carty and his Fightin’ Blue Hens were just a couple of plays away from winning nine-plus games for three consecutive seasons.

Carty is used to winning. He won as a player for Keeler at Delaware in the early 2000s. He won as a coach under Keeler at Sam Houston State. He’s won since returning to Delaware as the Fightin’ Blue Hens head football coach. It stands to reason he would like to win a lot more in Newark.

It was a huge achievement for the program to go bowling in its first season in the FBS. Now, how does Carty get his guys ready to build off that success in Year 2? Carty told me, “What I said after the season, I mean, and I would say it again right now. Not one person came to this place, the University of Delaware, to go 6-6. I understand that makes us bowl-eligible, and I understand that’s a huge feat. Don’t get me wrong, how excited we were to be in a bowl was unbelievable. The invitation that we got and the experience that we had was amazing. The fact that we got a chance to go down there and compete and win it was outstanding and so good for our program, so great for our players, our guys deserved it. This department and this university and this community deserved it because of the support that we’ve had in this transition.”

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Carty has been a part of championship-winning teams both as a coach at Sam Houston State and as a player at Delaware. He knows what it takes to win at the highest level wants to win at the highest level in Newark. Carty continued, “But it’s not what I got into coaching for. It’s not what, you know, I took the head-coaching job at the University of Delaware for was not to be .500. And so, you know, I don’t think there’s a person in our building that thinks that way, and so that means we have to work at it because winning is really hard and winning takes what it takes. There’s no choosing how hard you want to work on a day. There’s choosing if you want to win on Saturdays in the fall or Wednesdays or Thursdays, or Tuesdays or whenever we’re playing. That’s what you’re choosing. And so each day as we lead up to this that’s the message is, ‘Are we doing enough today to beat, you know, the teams that we’re are going to play on Saturdays in September, and Wednesdays in October and then in Championship Month in November?’ because, you know, that’s what we need right now is to kind of level up and continue to grow and continue to develop and every part of our offense and defense and special teams and every phase we need to get better. And so, we need to get better as coaches, we need to get better as players, we need to get better as support staff, there’s nobody that’s ever resting in Newark, Delaware.”

Carty made the transition from FCS to FBS look a whole lot easier than it is last season at Delaware. He won more games than he lost in his first season as an FBS head football coach. The same was true in each of the three seasons before when he was an FCS head football coach.

James Madison first played FBS football in 2023, and they made the College Football Playoff two seasons later. Could Carty guide the Fightin’ Blue Hens to similar heights in the next couple of seasons in Newark? Only time will tell, but history suggests it wouldn’t be wise to bet against the young, rising coaching star in the C-USA. Similar to what former Dukes head coach Curt Cignetti told folks when he first arrived in Bloomington, he wins. Google him.

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I came across a brutal statistic on the recent futility of the University of South Carolina athletics yesterday. The post came from Inside The Gamecocks on X, who highlighted just how bad things have been for Gamecock football, baseball, and men’s basketball since the first day of 2025. In baseball, the Gamecocks are 7-5 with losses to Army, Northern Kentucky, Queens, and just lost two of three in the Palmetto Series against in-state rival Clemson. After finishing tied for second in the SEC standings in men’s hoops in the 2023-24 season, the men’s basketball program has won five SEC games over the last two seasons and is quite likely to finish last in the conference in back-to-back seasons. After just missing the College Football Playoff in the 2024-25 season, the football program went 1-7 in the SEC in 2025-26 and finished fifteenth in the conference.

That’s tough.

That last line of that first paragraph stuck with me, though. The Gamecocks under head football coach Shane Beamer nearly qualified for the CFP two seasons ago. South Carolina finished that season fifteenth in ESPN’s FPI and was ninth in defensive efficiency. Only Texas and Tennessee had better defenses versus SEC competition than the Gamecocks two seasons ago, per CFBStats. BCFToys’ model liked Beamer’s team a bit more than ESPN’s, as his team finished No. 11 in FEI. The defense was playoff-worthy, but even with LaNorris Sellars’ emergence that season, the Gamecocks finished 42nd OFEI in stark contrast to that No. 8 finish in DFEI.

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South Carolina has had two completely different seasons over the last two years. For Beamer’s team to get back to the 2024-25 version, the addition of Kendal Briles as offensive coordinator needs to be one of the best coordinator hires of the cycle. ESPN’s Bill Connelly released his final 2025-26 SP+ rankings, and the Gamecocks finished in familiar territory – the defense much higher than the offense at 31st and 86th, respectively. Briles will be the third offensive coordinator in the last three seasons under Beamer. The latter has now had four different offensive coordinators since arriving in Columbia in 2021. Under Briles as offensive coordinator last season, the TCU Horned Frogs had a top-10 passing offense, per CFBStats. In fact, the Horned Frogs had a top-10 passing attack in each of the last two seasons. Even with Spencer Rattler and Sellers, the Gamecocks’ passing offense has never flirted with a top-10 finish in FBS under Beamer. The Briles-and-Sellers pairing is one of the more fascinating SEC storylines to monitor over the six months.

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The Gamecocks may have had a no-good-and-quite-terrible season in 2025-26, but over the last four seasons under Beamer, the team has bounced back twice after disappointing seasons. After smacking Tennessee and Clemson to close 2022 with some momentum, the Gamecocks went 5-7 the next season and didn’t make a bowl game. Then Beamer’s program went on to win nine games the following season. With a returning quarterback projected to potentially go as high as No. 1 in the 2026 NFL Draft, the Gamecocks went 4-8 and won just one conference game.

So Sellers is back. If he and Briles recreate some of that 2024-25 magic in Columbia, the Gamecocks could potentially have two first-round picks in Sellers and edge Dylan Stewart in next year’s draft. The Gamecocks’ biggest transfer portal addition came at a position of need at offensive tackle in former NC State offensive lineman Jacarrius Peak. Last season, left tackle Josiah Thompson struggled mightily in pass protection as he finished the season with a 46.6 PFF grade in pass-blocking snaps. With the Wolfpack last season, Peak registered a strong 84.1 PFF grade in pass-blocking snaps. How Peak fares in South Carolina’s nine conference games is of paramount importance for Beamer’s team next season.

There are a lot of questions at the skill-positions on offense once again for South Carolina, though. Outside wideout Nyck Harbor is back, along with solid slot guys in Jayden Sellers and Mazeo Bennett. Nitro Tuggle, formerly at Georgia and Purdue, is back in the SEC as a Gamecock. Does he make a move and start alongside Harbor on the outside? After last season’s Rahsul Faison debacle, you don’t really know what South Carolina has at running back, either. If the offensive line improves and a receiver and running back or two hit, you don’t have to squint too terribly hard to see a bounce-back year for the Gamecocks.

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On the schedule front, South Carolina has a 2026 schedule that should excite the fanbase. There is a very real chance this team is 4-1 when they head to Gainesville on October 10. They get Tennessee, Texas A&M, and Georgia all at Williams-Brice Stadium. Traveling to Death Valley to close has never looked more winnable. It’s a schedule where one could see the Gamecocks reaching the eight-win threshold.

The pressure will be on this football program in 2026, though. The men’s basketball program and baseball program might both have new head coaches this time next year. For Beamer, he made a needed change at offensive coordinator. He retained Sellers and Stewart, and his schedule looks conducive to a nice bounce-back season. This fanbase has watched a lot of losses pile up over the last calendar year, though, and the pressure will be on for Beamer to flip the script next season.

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Not today’s blog, though.

Indeed, in this piece, we’re going to dive into the ten schools in the G5 that I think are the most interesting underdog stories in college football this upcoming season.

Hawaii

This is where I mention that I am a bit biased when it comes to the Rainbow Warriors. I watched a lot of Colt Brennan play quarterback for the Bows as a kid, and, really, a lot of those June Jones Hawaii teams growing up. Current and former star quarterback Hawaii head football coach Timmy Chang, and the Rainbow Warriors have so many cool things going for them right now: 1) They have a star kicker in All-American Kansei Matsuzawa, 2) they have a tough-as-nails southpaw returning quarterback in Micah Alejado, and 3) ESPN’s Bill Connely put them in his Way-Too-Early CFP projections for next season. The Rainbow Warriors won nine games last season, the most the school has won since Nick Rolovich’s final season in 2019. Chang obviously had tremendous success as a quarterback for Hawaii in the early 2000s. If he’s able to return Hawaii to double-digit wins and a CFP birth glory in 2026, there is no better G5 story in college football.

Washington State

For a team that’s had a different head coach each of the last three years, the Cougs are in a good spot, particularly on offense, going into next season. Former Mizzou offensive coordinator Kirby Moore takes over in Pullman, and the cupboard isn’t bare. The Cougs return a lot on the offensive line, which is huge. They return three tailbacks, too. At quarterback, Caden Pinnick was awesome at UC Davis and could be a multi-year answer for Moore and the Cougs there. After what happened to Wazzu and Oregon State in the PAC-12, I’ll always hope for good things for these two schools. On a related note, this two-minute interview with Washington State’s president, Betsy Cantwell, fired me up, and I’m not even a Coug Fan.

North Texas

This feels a little late. Last year, the Mean Green finished with the No. 1 offense in FBS. Because of that tremendous success, they lost their head coach, their star quarterback, their star running back, and lots more. The Mean Green lost 37 players to the transfer portal but also brought in 49 players. New head coach Neal Green may not have been the flashiest hire to replace Eric Morris, but he’s solid and easy to root for. He won consistently at Troy, and although he never won big at West Virginia, the Mountaineers never bottomed out, either. He actually left WVU with a winning record, which I suspect would surprise a healthy chunk of college football fans. I’m very curious to see how this goes for North Texas next season.

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Kennesaw State

As both a Tennessee alum and fan, it is very easy to root for former UT running backs coach Jerry Mack. The Owls’ head football coach is 41-19 overall between KSU and North Carolina Central. He won ten games in his first season at Kennesaw State last year. The previous season, the Owls went 2-10. As it is in the sport now, success came with a price as star young quarterback Amari Odom hit the transfer portal and will now compete in a very crowded quarterback room at Syracuse. Nevertheless, I’m not in the business of not believing in Mack and would not be surprised to see the Owls remain close to the top of the C-USA once again.

Connecticut

It’s felt like Jason Candle has been rumored for over 100 CFB job openings over the last decade. After leading Toledo from 2016 to 2025, he finally left the Rockets for the Huskies. Candle has won an average of 9 games a year over the last four with the Rockets. Former UConn head coach Jim Mora, now off to Colorado State, averaged around that same figure his final two years in Connecticut. Will Candle keep that trend going for the Suddenly Competent Connecticut football program? I don’t know, but former Tennessee quarterback Jake Merklinger transferred to Storrs this offseason, so I’ll be doubly interested in the Huskies next season.

Air Force

After winning 29 games across three years from 2021 to 2023, including back-to-back seasons where the Falcons won double-digit games, Air Force has finished with a losing record in back-to-back seasons. Legendary coach Troy Calhoun has been their head football coach for nineteen seasons. He has had back-to-back losing seasons only one other time, back in 2017 and 2018. The following season, Air Force went 11-2 and won the Cheez-Its Bowl. The last two times that Air Force has won four or fewer games, Calhoun has guided the Falcons back to prominence with a double-digit win season. Calhoun has done an incredible job across two decades in Colorado Springs. Can he flip their fortune once again? I would never bet against one of the most underrated head football coaches this century.

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Delaware

Ryan Carty made it look easy in FBS with the Blue Hens last season. It’s not, but it’s a testament to how great the former Delaware quarterback has been leading his alma mater into the FBS. On the whole, Delaware is 33-17 under his watch, and the Blue Hens went bowling. I wonder what FBS jobs Carty’s name pops up in the next FBS head coaching cycle if he can build off last year’s impressive 7-6 season. All he’s done in his four years at Delaware is win. Will he continue it in Year 2 in the C-USA?

Marshall

Tony Gibson waited for his turn, that’s for sure. The longtime defensive whiz and Marshall head football coach was in his early fifties on his first night as a head football coach. Longtime college football fans have known the name forever. It’s universally understood that Gibson has been one of the best defensive minds in the sport for well over a decade now, first at West Virginia, then at NC State. A former Glennville State standout defensive back himself, the partnership between Gibson and the Thundering Heard made a lot of sense when the hire was first announced last offseason. Gibson went 5-7 in 2025, the lowest win total since former legendary coach Doc Holliday went 3-9 in 2016. Speaking of Holliday, he also went 5-7 in his first season at Marshall and went on to coach the team for eleven seasons. Marshall has won a lot of football games since joining the MAC in 1997. Gibson’s path to being a head football coach, especially at Marshall, makes the Thundering Herd an easy team to root for going into next season.

Liberty

Jamey Chadwell has had a bit of an odd career arc in coaching at the collegiate level. At Coastal Carolina, he did the thing that was possible at the G5 in the pre-Transfer Portal era, where he lost games early, but he established a program, and the wins soon followed. The Chantacliers won 31 games in their last three seasons at Coastal, and they played in one of my favorite college football games of the last decade against BYU. At Liberty, he won 13 games that first season, but then that total fell to eight in Year 2, down to four in Year 3. Chadwell has always been an innovative offensive mind, and the best versions of those Grayson McCall Coastal teams were an absolute delight to watch. When Chadwell was hired at Liberty, I think most college football fans assumed he’d win early and often. The first part was proven to be true, but the latter is yet to be determined.

New Mexico

Well, the Lobos lost their athletic director again, this time to Colorado in December. So New Mexico is now on its third AD since 2024. That’s hard. However, they have also nailed their last two football hires in Bronco Mendenhall and Jason Eck. The Lobos have won fourteen games over the last two seasons, the highest in two years in a decade, dating back to when Bob Davie was the head football coach. Even more impressive, 9-4 is the single best first season of any New Mexico football coach in school history. Eck is obviously a rising star in the sport, and all G5 Appreciators should be hoping Luke Fickell turns it around in Madison this year because Eck guiding the Lobos into uncharted waters of success would be extremely cool to see.

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On Saturday morning, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported the Buffalo Bills had hired Jim Leonhard away from the Denver Broncos to be the team’s new defensive coordinator. For LSU fans, I imagine it was already a bit surreal to see Joe Brady get elevated from NFL offensive coordinator to NFL head coach this offseason. For Wisconsin fans, I imagine it’s both a bit surreal and frustrating to see Leonhard continue to rise through the NFL ranks.

Brady was the play-caller for arguably the best offense in college football history when he was with the Tigers in 2019, when LSU won its last national championship. It was just one season in Baton Rouge before the 36-year-old elite offensive mind was back in the pros, but I imagine every Bayou Bengals fan is quite grateful for that one season with Brady. The Tigers led all of college football in scoring at 48.4 points per game, and Brady won the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach for his work with Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, and Justin Jefferson. In the Tigers’ final seven games that season, which included two College Football Playoff games, the SEC championship game, and a trip to Tuscaloosa, LSU averaged an astounding 50.7 points per game.

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What Brady did for LSU in 2019 reminds me a lot of what Gus Malzahn did for Auburn in 2010. Brady and Malzahn were offensive masterminds who orchestrated the top offenses in the top league and gave LSU and Auburn fans their schools’ best season this century. Both Brady and Malzahn won the Broyles Award after those magical seasons and were the perfect combination for the school’s premier quarterbacks in Burrow and Cam Newton, respectively. Sure, it was mighty helpful to have two Heisman-winning quarterbacks those seasons, but Brady has continued to thrive post-Burrow. Malzahn made it back to the National Championship with Nick Marshall years later and came close again with Jarrett Stidham a few years after that. The year after Malzahn left for Arkansas State, Auburn did not win a conference game. LSU played .500 football the next two years after Brady left for the NFL.

Malzahn returned to Auburn after a season coaching the Red Wolves to a SunBelt championship. Brady never returned to LSU. It did not work out with Brian Kelly, and we shall see if it will work out with Lane Kiffin. If you’re an LSU fan, it feels like you know it would have worked out had Brady returned to Baton Rouge, right? I imagine it was the same feeling Auburn fans felt when Malzahn returned to The Plains. There is already a proof-of-concept aspect with Brady and LSU – the same was true years ago with Malzahn and Auburn.

I suspect most LSU fans are excited about the Kiffin era. Rightfully so, it would be silly not to expect big things from one of the game’s best coaches and offensive minds. However, ever since that 2019 run, I have wanted to see how Brady would have fared as the head coach at LSU. If you replace Kelly with Brady in 2022, what’s different that year with Heisman winner Jayden Daniels?

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I wonder if Wisconsin fans feel the same way about Leonhard? The former Badgers walk-on was not only a great four-year player for the school in the early 2000s, but he also went on to become an elite defensive backs coach and, a year later, an elite defensive coordinator, all in Madison. He was a Broyles Award finalist in 2017, his first season calling the defense for his alma mater.

The Badgers had the No. 4 scoring defense in FBS in 2021. They were ninth the year before that. Tenth the year before that. Third in 2017. Between 2017 and 2022, the Badgers finished the season inside the top-10 in scoring defense four times and in the top-20 five times. In the three seasons post-Leonhard, the Badgers have finished in the top-10 or top-20 zero times.

The decision not to promote then-interim Leonhard to permanent coach in 2022, three years later, looks like an errant move by Wisconsin. Former Cincinnati head coach Luke Fickell is 17-20 and likely on the hot seat heading into his fourth season in Madison. The Badgers have one double-digit winning season over the last eight years. They had four in a row from 2014 to 2017. If they’re not careful, the Badgers will go the way of the Hokies sooner rather than later.

None of us know Leonhard would have fared as the permanent head coach at his alma mater, but we know where his defenses ranked while he was there. It’s fair to assume, like with Brady at LSU or Malzahn at Auburn, the side of the ball that he coached would have remained a defensive juggernaut under his leadership. Who Leonhard would have hired as his OC had he replaced Paul Chryst would have been just as important as it was for Fickell when he hired Phil Longo. The seismic offensive philosophy shift obviously did not work in Longo’s lone two seasons at Wisconsin. Still, you imagine Leonhard would have gotten more of the benefit of the doubt had he swung and missed on his first offensive coordinator hire. Lincoln Riley eventually hired D’Anton Lynn. Kirby Smart eventually hired Todd Monken. Marcus Freeman eventually hired Mike Denbrock. Mario Cristobal eventually hired Shannon Dawson.

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After leaving Wisconsin, Leonhard worked with a Super Bowl-winning offensive mastermind in Sean Payton, and will now work with a younger offensive mastermind in Brady. It’s fair to suspect, given who Leonhard has surrounded himself with in the NFL, that had he gotten the Badgers job in 2022, he would have eventually partnered with the right offensive coordinator in Madison.

Both Brady and Leonhard are two young coaches on the rise – and who knows, maybe both wind up back at LSU or Wisconsin one day, respectively. Right now, though, they are the two-headed monster tasked with bringing Buffalo its first Super Bowl championship. A little more than half a decade ago, Brady was commanding an elite offense at LSU, and Leonhard was commanding an elite defense at Wisconsin. Now they’re doing even bigger things on the biggest stage.

What would college football look like if Brady got the LSU job in 2022 or 2025? What if Leonhard got the Wisconsin job in 2022? They’re not the biggest what-ifs in the sport, but it’s one I’ll be thinking about a lot watching the Bills on Sundays this fall.

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Happy Friday, everybody. It has been months, er, years, since I have written one of these Nobody Asked mailbag columns.

I’ve missed writing these dearly for a couple of reasons: 1) I can’t write about everything I’d like to write about over the course of the week, so writing this particular column on this specific day of the week allows me to kind of do it, and 2) I’ve always worried if I opened up this column as an Actual Mailbag with Actual Reader Mailbag Questions than I might end up writing about a lot of other things besides the aforementioned things I wanted to write about.

So, here we are.

If you’d like me to write about a Tennessee question for a piece next week, I would be happy to acquiesce. Leave a comment at the end of this column today, and I’ll write about it next week.

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Q: Would taking a Trinidad Chambliss-type over a Brendan Sorsby-type in the transfer portal warrant a freakout by Tennessee fans? – Nobody, NotARealTown

This is one of those conundrums for Tennessee head football coach Josh Heupel that serves as a reminder of how challenging and stressful being a college head football coach is these days. I wrote a lot about how thin the margins were between Tennessee securing back-to-back trips to the College Football Playoff and finishing 8-4 in the regular season for the second time in the last three seasons. (Note: Tennessee has flip-flopped between 10 and eight regular-season wins the last four seasons, and had the 12-team field existed back in 2022, Heupel would have taken Tennessee to the CFP every even year that he’s been in Knoxville.)

Had Tennessee beaten Georgia and found a way to split the Oklahoma and Vanderbilt games at home, Heupel would have a lot more leeway in rolling with redshirt freshman George MacIntyre or true freshman Faizon Brandon at quarterback next season. You could even take this a step further: had Nico Iamaleava not departed in the spring, would the competition be between redshirt sophomore Jake Merklinger, MacIntyre, and Brandon going into 2026, and Tennessee wouldn’t have had to take a transfer quarterback at all this cycle?

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What happened, happened, though. I don’t think Heupel and his staff can go into 2026 with that much uncertainty at quarterback. In the Big 12, BYU can start a true freshman in Bear Bachmeier and not miss a beat. In the ACC, Pittsburgh can turn to a true freshman quarterback in the middle of their season and be in the conference title race in November. Even in the Big 12, Michigan can start a true freshman in Bryce Underwood because the Wolverines faced three ranked teams in the regular season. With the SEC moving to nine conference games next season, I don’t think the same rules apply.

Of the five teams from the SEC who made the CFP this season, zero have an underclassman at quarterback – Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed is the youngest and a redshirt sophomore – and Florida was the only SEC school to start a quarterback with two years or less college experience to begin the season. Tennessee’s 2026 schedule is loaded, and I suspect they’ll have to spend big on a quarterback out of the transfer portal, even with all their needs on the defensive side of the ball.

Q: Most pleasant surprise for Tennessee men’s basketball through the first month and some change of the 2025-26 season? – Nobody, NotARealTown

Longtime listeners of The Chase Thomas Podcast know that I have been a believer in redshirt sophomore big JP Estrella. The former blue-chip recruit has a sky-high ceiling in Knoxville, and I’ve still got my fingers crossed that he reaches it while a member of the Tennessee Volunteers men’s basketball team.

You saw glimpses again of Estrella’s potential emergence inside with a couple of buckets around the rim against Louisville at the Food City Center on Tuesday evening in the Vols’ blowout win over the Cardinals.

However, Vanderbilt transfer big Jaylen Carey is my answer here, and it’s not really close. When you combine Estrella’s continued awful injury luck, along with junior big Cade Phillips having to shut his season down due to shoulder surgery, head men’s basketball coach Rick Barnes very much needed Carey to be A Guy.

I’m happy to write that Carey is A Guy for Tennessee. He was electric against Syracuse, where he was 10-of-16 from the floor and finished with a 22/9 line. He was the lone bright spot in a terrible loss on the road in upstate New York. The junior big is averaging nearly nine boards and nearly 14 points per game over his last four with the Vols.

Carey, like Estrella, can at times seem unstoppable once they get in position and the ball inside. My lone complaint is the poor free-throw shooting thus far from Carey, but he’s doing so many other things well that it’s hard to get too riled up about that. The Carey we’re seeing now is a very different Carey from the one we saw to start the season, which is huge with SEC play starting here in just a matter of weeks.

Q: Now that Josh Elander’s first coaching staff at Tennessee as the head baseball coach is complete, who do you think will prove to be the most important hire this cycle? – Nobody, NotARealTown

I wrote earlier this week about how excited I am to watch this Tennessee baseball team in 2026 under first-year head baseball coach Josh Elander. The longtime assistant under Tony Vitello was the right choice for the job, and his inaugural staff here in Knoxville has all the potential to be another juggernaut in the loaded SEC.

You could go one of two ways here: 1) Chuck Jeroloman or 2) Keegan Knoll. I lean towards the latter.

Rocky Top Insider’s Ryan Schumpert wrote a really great piece on the excellence of Eberhardt in 2023 that I think back to when I answer this question. Josh Reynolds was a Vitello hire from Cincinnati in 2024 and felt like the pitching-coach-in-waiting for Tennessee whenever Frank Anderson retired, or in this case, followed Vitello to his next job. I think he keeps these elite Tennessee arms rolling in 2026 and beyond.

With Eberhardt, though, there was no obvious in-house replacement for him. The fact that he and Knoll worked together in the Big Leagues in Chicago in 2022 matters. The strength coach position is huge for Tennessee baseball. The Vols must continue to obliterate the baseball, particularly in Lindsey Nelson Stadium, to keep the university’s best program humming. (Essentially, you don’t want to become the 2024 or 2025 Atlanta Braves.)

If Knoll proves to be a plug-and-play replacement for Eberhardt, I suspect his addition this offseason would prove to be the most critical. Still, all of Knoll, Craig Bell, and Jeroloman figure to be fantastic hires for Elander, but if I can only select one of these three names, I think it’s Knoll.

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We are just two weeks away from it being four months since Tennessee football opened the season in Atlanta with a 45-26 victory over the Syracuse Orangemen. We say it every year because it is true every year– the college football season flies by.

Just like that, head football coach Josh Heupel’s fifth season on Rocky Top has come to a close, as the Volunteers finished the regular season with an 8-4 record overall, the fourth-straight season where the Vols have won at least eight games in the regular season.

Yes, the home finale beatdown at the hands of in-state rival Vanderbilt was not how you wanted to finish what was largely another successful season for Heupel and the Volunteers. Still, there were several extremely positive takeaways to have following the conclusion of the 2025 regular season for Tennessee.

Let’s dive into five of them.

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1. Year 5 was a critical season for Heupel offensively. After finishing the 2022 season No. 1 in scoring in all of FBS, the Vols dropped to 35th the following season. In 2024, Tennessee was 74th in scoring vs. conference opponents. While the scoring dropped, the production on the ground did not for Tennessee, which finished in the top 10 in rushing yards per game in 2023 and 2024. Surprisingly, it was the passing game that struggled mightily over the course of those two seasons, with the Vols’ passing attack finishing 51st and 77th, respectively. Tennessee needed to look under the hood this past offseason and make some adjustments based on how defenses were playing them now, as opposed to the first two seasons under Heupel. To the latter’s credit, those adjustments did happen this season. The Vols were the No. 3 passing offense in the country this season, and finished No. 5 in FBS in that same metric against conference foes. The evolution of the Tennessee offense this season was something that needed to happen to continue to instill long-term faith in Heupel’s program in Knoxville, and he checked that box.

2. Speaking of the offense, Tennessee put up these prolific offensive numbers with a quarterback who arrived in late May, in Joey Aguilar. The former Appalachian State & UCLA quarterback threw for nearly 3,500 yards, tossed 24 touchdowns, and finished 20th in QBR. The veteran quarterback’s ability to adapt to his new surroundings quickly was critical not just for his individual success, but it was also paramount for players like Chris Brazzell II, who may have played his way into being a first-round pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. Aguilar’s willingness to push the ball down the field was huge for the Vols, especially early in the season. Aguilar may not have finished as strongly as he started, but he certainly had an all-around great season for Tennessee, and he did so on a very short timeline. Aguilar finished 7th overall, per PFF, among qualified quarterbacks offensively. With the issues the Vols had defensively all season long, Tennessee had to have the kind of season Aguilar gave them to push for nine or ten wins, and that’s what he did.

3. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that Braylon Staley looks to be the best all-around wideout Tennessee has had during Heupel’s tenure on Rocky Top. Brazzell II was certainly the most dangerous weapon down the field for Tennessee this season, as the former Tulane star reeled in six touchdowns on balls thrown 20-plus yards down the field this season. Unsurprisingly, Brazzell II graded the highest on those deep throws from Aguilar and provided Tennessee the replacement they needed from Dont’e Thornton Jr.’s production from the season prior. Staley is a bit different, as he’s not the burner Jalin Hyatt was in the slot three years ago. He’s not like Velus Jones Jr. or Squirrel White, either. He’s just a wideout that looks and plays like he’s going to play on Sundays sooner rather than later. The redshirt freshman was consistent when targeted everywhere on the football field this season, as he earned a 91.1 on deep throws, 94.4 on medium, and 91.5 on short throws. Staley reeled in touchdowns from each of those three areas this season. The former blue-chip recruit was so consistent all season long that he earned SEC Freshman of the Year honors for good measure. Outside of David Sanders Jr., is there not a more exciting and vital core piece to Tennessee than Staley going into 2026?

4. No, you did not beat Georgia, but you were a missed field goal from doing so inside Neyland Stadium this year. In fact, Tennessee played so well against Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs that expectations among Vol fans collectively changed, even in agonizing defeat. For the first time in the Heupel versus Smart battles, the Vols and the Dawgs were in a highly-contested game late into the fourth quarter. Heupel has beaten Alabama and Florida twice. If there were a 12-team CFP in 2022, he’d have taken the Vols to the CFP in two of his five seasons in Knoxville. But beating Smart and Georgia is hard. It’s the hardest thing left outside of winning a national championship for Heupel to accomplish at Tennessee. A little over a week ago, the Dawgs won the SEC championship for the second year in a row. There is no bigger goliath in the conference than Georgia, and Heupel had the Vols right there at the very end. That loss is always going to hurt, especially now that Tennessee won’t play Georgia every season anymore — but you can’t deny it was not a huge positive development for both the fans and the players to see they’ve reached a point in their program’s trajectory where they can slay the dragon in this conference.

5. Tennessee is going to need a lot of help out of the transfer portal in the secondary this offseason. The Vols are likely to lose two cornerbacks who could both be first-round picks in the 2026 NFL Draft in Jermod McCoy and Colton Hood. Tennessee will need to replace the two players who got the most snaps at STAR in Boo Carter and Jalen McMurray. They will also have to replace a two-year starter in Andre Turrentine as well at safety. Still, barring absurd injury luck in 2026 as Tennessee had in 2025, the Vols should return one of the best cornerback duos in the conference in sophomore Ty Redmond and redshirt junior Rickey Gibson III. The former earned a top-100 PFF coverage grade along with Hood this season. Gibson III was a top-100 graded corner last year, along with McCoy and Gibson III as well. The Vols really struggled at safety all season long, but the corners, for the second year in a row, held their own once again. It shouldn’t be a surprise if they’re one of Tennessee’s best position units in 2026 once again.

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It is a very good thing that Tim Banks reportedly signed a new contract extension with the University of Tennessee to continue in 2025 and beyond as head football coach Josh Heupel’s defensive coordinator. It is, undoubtedly, a very good thing. However, this being seen as a very good thing varies depending on who you ask amongst the Tennessee Volunteers fanbase.

I’ll be clear: I don’t get it.

Banks has been Heupel’s defensive coordinator since the beginning dating back to 2021. Each season under the former Central Michigan cornerback’s leadership the Volunteer defense has gotten better. The Vols were 90th in scoring defense in 2021, improved to 36th in 2022, improved again to 22nd in 2023 and put together their best season in 2024 with the 7th best scoring defense in the country. Tennessee had a top-10 rushing defense this past season. The Vols were 5th nationally in defensive YPA at 4.45. In the Vols’ ten victories this season, Tennessee allowed just 3.91 YPA, third nationally and ahead of the national champion Ohio State Buckeyes. The Vols have even been top-10 nationally in TFLs in each of the last two seasons. There is no way around it – Banks has turned Tennessee’s defense into, without question, one of the best units in all of college football.

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Now, with Banks back, you have continued continuity on the side of the football that has carried Tennessee each of the past two seasons. The Vols were 78th in scoring in conference play this season, while the Vols were 17th in scoring defense in conference play this season. Banks and his defensive staff have gotten better and better each season on Rocky Top. The Vol offense did not score an offensive point in the first half for three straight SEC games and still went 2-1 with victories over their rivals in Alabama and Florida. In each of those three games, Banks’ defense kept those three teams under twenty points. Georgia was the only team whose offense accounted for twenty-plus points against Banks’ defense in the regular season.

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The defense was the backbone of the 2024 Tennessee Volunteers and in 2025 there are a lot of reasons to believe that will be the case again. Tennessee returns key starters Bryson Eason, Dominic Bailey, Arion Carter, Jermod McCoy, Rickey Gibson II, Boo Carter, and Andre Turrentine. Sure, Tennessee will miss James Pearce Jr. a bit on the edge, but there probably isn’t a deeper, more intriguing rotation on this depth chart than the LEO position. Joshua Josephs, Caleb Herring, Jordan Ross and Marion Dye are all former four- and five-star recruits in the last few cycles – Tennessee will be fine there and everywhere else across the defensive line. At linebacker, the Vols have never had more blue-chip talent with Edwin Spillman back and more four-stars entering the fray in Christian Gass, Jaedon Harmon and a couple of others. Tennessee’s three top corners are all back in 2025 and all three were PFF top-101 coverage corners in 2024. Carter should be even better at the STAR position and a guy like Edrees Farooq could certainly prove to be an upgrade over Will Brooks alongside Turrentine at safety.

The most amount of turnover on the Volunteer defense in 2025 is along with the defensive line, which is a good spot for the Vols to be in as it is deepest room on the team and a room that thrives with transfers like Omar Norman-Lott or in-house recruits like Pearce Jr. Remember, before last season there was a lot of concern regarding the turnover in the secondary and the Vols just had the best season back there yet under Banks.

Tim Banks, and the defense as a whole, may also be one of Heupel’s most overlooked and underrated positive traits as the Tennessee head football coach – he has hired well on that side of the ball. Whether it is Banks, Rodney Garner, Brian Jean-Mary, Willie Martinez, William Inge, etc., Heupel both assembled and maintained a strong nucleus of defensive coaches in his four years in Knoxville. For some offensive head coaches, like Dan Mullen with Todd Grantham or Lincoln Riley with Alex Grinch, they whiffed on the hiring of defensive coaches early on in high-profile jobs like Florida and USC, respectively. Heupel hired well in 2021 on that side of the ball and you’re finally seeing it on the field in an elite way.

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Perhaps most importantly, though, when it comes to Banks’ contract extension with Tennessee is that the Vols will now not go into Year 5 with huge unknowns on both sides of the ball. Sure, the defense might take the slightest of steps back next season, or it may take the slightest of steps forward next season. At 7th nationally in scoring defense in 2024, it’s a whole lot harder to move up a few more slots than it was to go from 33rd to 22nd a few seasons ago. With Banks and all the returning talent on that side of the ball, though, you can project the Vols’ defense to be one of the best once again in 2025.

Heupel and the Vols need that comfort once again in 2025 with so much uncertainty with the offense next season. The Vols made the CFP when the offense ranked 77th in passing yards per game. If they want to make a run in the CFP next season, the offense has to be a whole lot better. Of the last six national champions, only 2023-24 Michigan averaged less than 9 YPA through the air on the season and they were right at 8.9. The explosive chunk plays have to return. The offensive tackles have to protect better. Nico Iamaleava has to get the most out of the returning blue-chippers in Mike Matthews and Braylon Staley, among several other young, talented wideouts. Those young wideouts have to help their former five-star quarterback out, too. Tennessee’s offense has to get back on track in 2025. Time will tell if that will ultimately be the case in a pivotal Year 5 for Heupel in Knoxville, but the return of Banks as DC ensures that the Tennessee defense will once again be one of the best in the country.

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Chase Thomas is the Sports Renaissance Man, Atlanta Sports Guy & VFL. On today's program, Chase is joined by GoVols247's Ben McKee to talk about Tennessee vs. Auburn on Saturday night (4:00), Darlinstone Dubar questions for the Vols (18:00), Dalton Bargo and Stone Lawless hype for Tennessee baseball (27:20). Then, Knoxville News Sentinel's Adam Sparks sits down with Chase to talk about the 2025 projected Tennessee Volunteers football depth chart (35:00), questions with the offense (46:00), where Boo Carter fits everywhere and taking the training wheels off for Nico Iamaleava next season (56:00).

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The SRM Daily Column Schedule

Each day, I write a different column over here on SRM on the Tennessee Vols all year long.

MONDAY- 48 Hours After Tennessee Vols Recap

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WEDNESDAY- Tennessee Vols Wednesday Wonder

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The Chase Thomas Podcast Lineup

There are a lot of different ways to stay locked in on all the Tennessee Vols podcasting coverage I’m putting out every day.

Below is my weekly podcast lineup, so you always know what’s coming down the pike each day on the program. (Note: There are always surprise special Tennessee Vols guests that pop in throughout the week as well. Some examples include Volquest’s Brent Hubbs, Tennessee CF Hunter Ensley, 99.1 The Sports Animal’s Tyler Ivens, GoVols247’s Ryan Callahan, Tony Basilio, Sports Source’s John Pennington and so many others.)

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MONDAY - A Pod Divided w/ Fellow University of North Georgia alumni Matt Green

TUESDAY - Tennessee Vols Sports Guys w/ Rocky Top Insider’s Ryan Schumpert, Saturday Down South’s Ethan Stone and Omaha Production’s Jack Foster

WEDNESDAY - More Important Issues w/ Landon Raby & Caleb Mitchell

THURSDAY - A Pod Divided w/ Fellow University of North Georgia alumni Matt Green

THURSDAY - Vols Hoops Hour w/ Vol Report’s Ryan Sylvia

FRIDAY - Vols Best Bets & Tennessee Baseball w/ Omaha Production’s Jack Foster

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(Final Note: All of this and more information on Knoxville’s No. 1 independent Tennessee Vols podcast is available over at the official website which you can find here.)

Make it a great Friday, everyone.

Go Vols,

Chase

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Cornelius Fudge did not believe that Lord Voldemort had returned. While the evidence was mounting this was in fact the case, with all of the disappearances and the like, not to mention Harry Potter’s own testimony following the conclusion of the Triwizard Tournament, Fudge refused to see reason. Lord Voldemort had returned, but the Minister of Magic so desperately wanted that to not be the case. He knew the gravity of the Dark Lord’s return, and what it meant for the wizarding world in the immediate term – destruction and doom. Fudge knew the panic such an announcement would create in the community, so he made a series of irrational and disturbing choices that play out over the course of the fifth book, “Harry Poter and The Order of the Phoenix.” Fudge during that time reminds me a lot of Tennessee fans during this time.

Tennessee is back.

Voldemort was back.

You can understand why Tennessee fans would be slow to adjust to this new reality, to be sure. 1998 was a long time ago, as a lot of Georgia fans like to remind Vol fans of late following their 2021-22 national championship victory, and they have been down this road before. Former Tennnessee head football coach Butch Jones got Tennessee to 5-0 in 2016, too. After taking down Florida and Georgia in succession, the Vols lost to No. 8 Texas A&M, No. 1 Alabama and unranked South Carolina in succession. Those Vols ended up winning nine games following a bowl victory over Nebraska, but the Vols never built off that sizzling 5-0 start in ‘16.

To be fair, there are some similarities on the schedule between ‘16 and ‘22. An out-of-conference victory over a solid ACC team, and then two victories over two ranked SEC teams before reaching the toughest part of their schedule. However, the ‘22 Vols do not head to No. 3 Alabama on Saturday, the latter will make the trip to Knoxville. In ‘22, the Vols have a buffer game with UT-Martin before traveling to Georgia to face the Dawgs in Athens. In ‘16, the Vols had the Aggies and Crimson Tide back-to-back. Those ‘16 Vols did not have a bye or gimme-game squeezed in between any of their four-game gauntlet versus Florida, Georgia, Texas A&M and Alabama.

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The ‘22 Vols don’t have that problem. They had time for their No. 1 wideout Cedric Tillman to get take time and heal that ankle before the Third Saturday in October. They had a bye in-between an emotional victory over the Gators and their big-time trip to Baton Rouge. Perhaps most notably, the ‘22 Vols have a quarterback who is both a real Heisman candidate and, to this point, been the best quarterback in the sport’s best conference.

Still, those ‘16 Vols still finished in the top-15 in SP+ and won nine games. They were a good team, one of the best Tennessee has fielded in the last twenty years. If that Vanderbilt debacle doesn’t happen, those Vols win double-digit games and finish the season on a four-game winning streak. That mid-season losing streak still hurts when you consider they swept the Gators, Bulldogs and Wildcats and still didn’t win the East, but ten wins is ten wins.

The ‘22 Vols are just a bit different. The schedule is a bit different. Alabama is a bit different. The Vols’ offense is a major bit different. Those ‘16 Vols were 62nd in passing offense. They were 24th in scoring offense. They were good, Josh Dobbs was No. 2 in the SEC in YPA at 8.2 that season, but Hooker is better. He’s No. 1 in the conference, a distant No. 1 at that, in an absurd 10.8 YPA. (That number is even more staggering when you consider Tillman, Hooker’s favorite target, has been unavailable the last two games, both of which were against ranked SEC foes.) The ‘22 Vols are No. 2 nationally in scoring. They are No. 1 in total offense, with two other undefeated schools, TCU and Ohio State, behind them. In an ever-increasing offensively driven sport, the Vols may very well have the best one in the best conference. None of which was true for a ‘16 Vols team that nearly won double-digit games.

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Coming into the ‘22 season, I said on my podcast that the Vols would win double-digit games. Or they would win six. There was no quiet rise for a team built the way Tennessee was built since Josh Heupel arrived in Knoxville. I came back to the 2021 national scoring averages. Tennessee was the only Power 5 school to finish top-10 in scoring and not win double-digit games. Ohio State, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma all did it. The Vols did not.

Through six weeks, the trend continues – scoring is everything. Eight of the ten teams in the top-10 is undefeated, with Oregon and UNC being the lone outliers with just one loss. The Vols having one of the two best offenses in the sport, with Ohio State being the other, is a game-changer. Hendon Hooker is a game-changer. Josh Heupel has been a game-changer.

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On Saturday in Baton Rouge, Tennessee remained undefeated for a variety of reasons. The defensive front led by Byron Young shined once again with five sacks and 11 pressures as a collective unit. Jabari Small broke out as the team ran all over LSU. Hooker beat the Tigers with his legs and his arm. Bru McCoy and Jalin Hyatt stepped up once again with Tillman out due to injury. Gerald Mincey could not go at LT and J.J. Crawford stepped in and didn’t miss a beat. You still can’t run on this Tennessee defense. This Tennessee team isn’t perfect. Christian Charles has a lot on his plate now with long-time starter Warren Burrell out for the season at CB and he got lit up on Saturday to the tune of six receptions on eight targets. The Vols have their issues in the secondary, and yet, they won comfortably 40-13.

With College GameDay and SEC Nation returning to Rocky Top on Saturday for the biggest Tennessee vs. Alabama game in ages, the excitement at Tennessee is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Both schools will meet as undefeated foes for the first time since 1989. Alabama’s superstar quarterback Bryce Young is beat up. Had Quinn Ewers not been knocked out of the game in Week 2, it seemed as tough Texas was on their way to a win over the Crimson Tide in Austin. The line sits somewhere around a touchdown depending on where you look. You can’t ask for more from Heupel’s team in Year 2. What you can do, though, is, like Fudge had to finally do, is accept that Tennessee football is back.

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I’m drinking the big orange Kool-Aid.

There are too many Tennessee football hype videos across my social media timelines not too at this point. I’m writing this on a Monday afternoon, hours removed from the first official depth chart of the season getting released for the Volunteers. Former USC and Texas wideout and five-star high school recruit Bru McCoy is listed as a co-starter with Walker Merrill. You see Juwuan Mitchell as one of the co-starters with Aaron Beasley at the linebacker spot opposite of Jeremy Banks. Christian Charles found himself as a co-starter with Kamal Hadden across from Warren Burrell. When you look at this depth chart and compare it to what head coach Josh Heupel had to work with last season it’s a night-and-day difference for Coach Heupel in Year 2 on Rocky Top.

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Thankfully, the Vols don’t open on the road in Dublin against a Big Ten West team this week to rip our hearts out this early in the season. No, the Vols have Ball State on the docket Thursday night. I will be in Neyland Stadium once again on Thursday night. I will, once again, likely watch the Vols score a lot of points and dominante an overmatched Group of 5 school, as Tennessee should. I am very much looking forward to spending three hours with the Tennessee football team once again on Thursday night under the lights.

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I’ve missed it dearly.

I’ve missed the best first-quarter offense in the country.

I remember soaking in those last few moments following the conclusion of the Tennessee vs. Vanderbilt game to wrap up the regular season last fall. I did not want to turn away from the football coliseum that I had spent so much time pouring my emotions into over the last several months. I could not believe it was already over again. The summer before the season starts feels like an enterinity and the actual season moves faster than you would ever believe. I remember the deep breaths I took before I left the stadium with the Sports Renaissance Woman. I took some pictures, sure, but I stared a lot. Each season, you only get six of these games at home, and then they’re gone for nine months again. It’s never not going to be a jarring experience when it hits you the season is over once again.

You don’t really feel this during basketball and baseball season. You feel like the season went as long as expected. It feels like a grind, even though you still enjoy it. You don’t ever feel like it passed you by too fast. It is enjoyable and a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the limited dates for Tennessee home football games that will always catch you off guard. One week, I was losing my mind like a madman watching Tennessee fall to Pittsburgh at home for their first loss of the season to watching Tennessee crush the Commodores and wrap up their 2021 season. 

It goes quick, man. Like Peter in Season 1 of ‘FBoy Island’ — gone before you know it. I could tell you to soak it all in. I could tell you to do your best to stay present and enjoy the ride. I did last year. It still flew by. It will fly by this year. Regardless of the record for the Vols, this season will fly by. I know it will. I know in December I’ll be dumbfounded it’s all over once again. 

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I’m happy this is the case, though. I love that about the sport. Every Saturday matters, and you only get a handful of these each year. Enjoy it, but understand it’s going to be Vanderbilt Week before you know it and you are never going to be able to believe it.

Drink the big orange Kool-Aid, friends. It’s free and good for you. Hendon Hooker could be a Heisman finalist. Tennessee could win ten games. The Vols could win six games. The offense is going to be electric. The Vols are going to score a bunch of points. You’re going to have a good time watching this Tennessee team this fall. It all starts on Thursday against the Cardinals without the question mark at quarterback like they had a season ago. You have a star quarterback, a star wideout and a star offensive mind as your head coach. Things are good on Rocky Top. It’s officially Game Week in Tennessee.

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Chase Thomas is the Sports Renaissance Man, Atlanta Sports Guy and Vol For Life. He is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee and resides in Knoxville, TN. Chase obtained his undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of North Georgia. He has written for a variety of publications that include Outsider, SB Nation, VICE Sports, SI’s The Cauldron, Cox Media Group & ESPN’s TrueHoop Network. You can email him at chasethomaspodcast[at]gmail.