Tennessee Football made a splash this offseason by hiring strength coach Derek Owings away from the Indiana Football program after he helped build the Hoosiers’ national championship-winning roster. Since arriving in Knoxville the day after the championship contest, Owings and his impressive staff have been hard at work laying the foundation for the Vols’ 2026 roster.
Owings didn’t come cheap, as Tennessee made him the highest-paid strength coach in the nation, according to a report from CBS Sports’ Matt Zenitz. The move was worth it on paper, though. Tennessee needed to become a bigger, stronger, and faster team this offseason. And judging from the latest statistics, that’s exactly what’s happened this offseason.
The increase in speed is almost too wild to believe. In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Owings revealed that Tennessee has gone from 12 players to 47 players with a max speed of 21+ miles per hour. It’s an absolutely astounding increase, with nearly four times as many players reaching that speed as before.
While speaking with Voice of the Vols Mike Keith back in March, Owings said that he trains speed two to three times a week during the offseason.
“One will be a true top-end day, and then right now, because of the yardage we’re getting in other areas, two acceleration days,” Owings detailed.
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Owings continued on to describe how he trains speed, which has obviously resulted in Tennessee’s impressive growth.
“There’s technique, there’s strength, and obviously it’s just getting guys exposure to those speeds,” Owings said. “There’s a lot of kids that have the genetic potential to run fast, but they’ve been so de-trained because they haven’t been exposed to that sprinting in such a long time. Whether it’s high school, a previous college that wanted to live in, hey, more mental toughness- I’d say whether its 300s, gassers, stadiums. And they get de-trained because they don’t get those exposures to high speeds. It’s getting them back, getting them strong, putting them in good positions, hammering technique, and then getting them to run fast multiple times a week. And then you improve speed, but you also kind of get some of that genetic potential back.”
Owings has this thing down to a science, and it’s all tracked by analytics and data. It’s a proven method after all the success that he had with Indiana. Later in the interview with Keith, Owings explained what Tennessee will be doing during fall camp and in the season, which is a timeline that begins in just over two weeks.
“When we look at in-season, we’ve gotten to the end of July, we’re starting camp. In our GPS, we’ll have a rolling five- to seven-day, basically, average, where if a guy has not hit 90% of his individual max, we’ve got to find a way to bake it into practice,” Owings said. “Whether it’s organically on a go-ball in 7-on-7, maybe it’s a special teams cover rep, or maybe it’s off to the side, having guys hit a build-up, we want to make sure we’re keeping those exposures every single week so that they have that speed on Saturday.”
Owings and his team’s philosophy isn’t just that Tennessee should do a lot of work during the offseason and hope it carries through for the whole regular season. Their method is that Tennessee should keep and even increase its speed stats throughout the season. And with the proof in the pudding in the way that Indiana was able to dominate competition for five months last year, it’s an easy buy-in.
“As much as anything, him spearheading nutrition, training room, everybody being in sync, the growth that our players have seen from mass, explosive power, speed, and acceleration, the tangible differences that they’ve seen, our players are fully bought into it,” Josh Heupel said during SEC Media Days this week. “Have seen great changes and are excited about what work they’ve put in and the benefit of that.”
