There was widespread excitement and optimism when Tennessee Football hired Jim Knowles to be its next defensive coordinator early in the offseason. Not only is Knowles one of the best coordinator minds in the sport and a former national champion, but he also had the advantage of bringing along some of his assistant coaches while at Penn State to ease the transition.
On top of that, Tennessee brought in a haul of players from the transfer portal to increase competition and skill across all three levels.
Still, though, there was one common narrative from the media that it took at least one year for players to truly understand Knowles’ complex or exotic schemes. Plenty of big media names in the sport felt like Knowles was the right direction for Tennessee to go, but also felt like it might be a year before the results really started ramping up.
Veteran Tennessee linebacker Arion Carter isn’t buying that, though. At SEC Media Days earlier this week, popular YouTube analyst Brooks Austin asked Carter about this narrative and whether he felt like some of the defensive players on the team were still “swimming” or anything was “over their head” as the coaches installed the new defense. Carter quickly shut it down.
“It’s over their head? Nah. Nuh-uh,” Carter said. “Like, (Knowles) always says, on game days it’s his job to make sure you’re ready and you know what’s going on. Because if you bust a coverage or you have a missed assignment, that’s on him. That’s on the coaches around – as he says, it’s because they didn’t teach it good enough. And if he’s putting in certain packages that are too complex, per se, to keep it simple and let us be reactive and not be apprehensive about whatever’s going on that’s in front of us to hesitate, he’s not going to put it in. So everything that we’ve done to this point, we’ve been able to grasp it, and we’ve been able to build and master on top of that.”
The Vols’ new defensive unit projects to have plenty of new faces as starters and rotating players, but there is a good amount of experience in the group. You’ve got defensive lineman Xavier Gilliam and linebacker Amare Campbell, who played under Knowles at Penn State. Same with safety Dejuan Lane. You’ve got Carter, Edwin Spillman, and Jeremiah Telander, who are all experienced veteran players. Auburn transfer cornerback Kayin is entering his senior season and has played in 36 games with 25 starts in his career, all coming in SEC football. Safety Edrees Farooq started all 13 games for the Vols last season.
Carter believes that experience helps ease the transition and expedite the process.
“Especially me being an older guy, and we have an older guy at every position,” Carter said. “So we’ve all played a good amount of football, at least two to three years, at least. You know what I’m saying? So when you have that, with a genius mind like (Knowles), you know, you can run exotic blitz packages. You can show different types of shells and coverages that you may not be able to do with an incoming freshman or sophomore who’s never really played a lot of football.”
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Historically and statistically speaking, Knowles’ defenses have improved as the years of a tenure go on. That makes sense on a broad, common sense level. But every story is different. It clearly sounds like Carter believes that the experience Tennessee has on its roster, both in terms of guys who have played football and guys who have played under Knowles, will help kick things into gear right away.
There’s also the interesting point that Carter made about Knowles understanding which packages to put in and which packages to take on, based on the personnel that he has in front of him. That’s a big deal. One narrative that has gone around is that defenses have a hard time picking up certain things in year one. But as Carter said, he believes Knowles has the “genius” knowledge to be able to pick and choose what will work best. Again, that’s a big deal.
Tennessee’s new defense under Knowles has been one of the biggest talking points around the team throughout the offseason. There’s optimism around what it can be, though perhaps it’s cautious optimism early on. And while there will be growing pains at times, maybe Carter’s words can start to alleviate any worries that some Vol fans may have based on what they heard from national pundits throughout the offseason.
We’ll still have to see it on the field, though.
Check out the full interview with Brooks Austin and Arion Carter below:
