Excellent article by 538 on the meteoric rise of Heupel’s VOLS

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Tennessee’s improvement under Heupel starts with playing an entirely different style of football.. Heupel, a former quarterback at Oklahoma, has a unique way of doing business on that side of the ball. He loves two things: up-tempo offenses and deep, perimeter passes. The 2022 Vols use just 21.3 seconds of clock per offensive snap, the fifth-fastest rate in the Football Bowl Subdivision, per ESPN’s Stats and Information Group. They play almost the entire game with three receivers, one running back, and one tight end on the field, and they love to chuck it deep to those targets. Tennessee’s average intended pass travels 11.0 yards downfield, 11th-deepest in FBS. They run lots of run/pass options (in terms of raw number of RPOs, they’re running the 12th-most in FBS). They commonly line up receivers almost on the sidelines, preferring wide splits to spread the defense and get receivers isolated against defensive backs. It works, because QB Hendon Hooker has a huge arm and several of his receivers (Jalin Hyatt, Cedric Tillman and USC transfer Bru McCoy) have come on strong as playmaking threats.

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Tennessee’s nasty offensive line underpins all of this success. The unit allows pressure on just 16.1 percent of dropbacks, the second-lowest rate in FBS, despite facing a blitz once every three snaps, well above the national average of 27 percent. Even when defenses bring heat, Hooker has the time he needs to use his rocket launcher. The Vols also have an efficient running game, led by Hooker and tailbacks Jaylen Wright and Jabari Small. They are 13th in FBS in expected points added per game from rushing. And when the offensive line smells blood, it gets it: Tennessee has reached goal-to-go on 17 drives this season and has scored a touchdown on every single one of them. The national touchdown rate on such drives is 76 percent, and no other team is at 100 percent with more than 10 goal-to-go possessions.

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The defense is less material to Tennessee’s breakthrough, but has held up its end of the bargain. While the offense is currently second in Bill Connelly’s SP+ metric, the defense is 39th, up a bit from 47th at the end of last season. Tennessee has figured out run defense in particular, where the Vols are 17th in EPA per game. The defense has had less success against the pass, where it’s 74th. If Tennessee has a flaw in its exhaust port for Alabama to exploit, the most obvious is a problem with explosive passing plays. The defense has allowed four 20-plus-yard completions per game, tied for 110th-best in FBS.

Even so, Heupel’s greatest trick so far is that he has found balance. Under Pruitt, and even in the final year of his fired predecessor Butch Jones, Tennessee was a no-offense, all-defense program. Between 2017 and 2020, Tennessee never ranked better than 74th in Offensive SP+ or worse than 54th in Defensive SP+. For better and worse, Heupel flipped the script in 2021, and Tennessee went 7-6. The 2022 team has kept scoring while managing to stop the bleeding on defense. The result is a 5-0 start.

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