It’s rare that halfway through the season, an offense has to prepare for a defense that it knows virtually nothing about. That’s the spot Tennessee football is in when it welcomes Arkansas to town, though. After firing Sam Pittman, Bobby Petrino was named interim head coach. One of his first moves was overhauling the defensive staff.
With a new defensive coordinator in place, the Vols don’t know exactly what to expect. There is plenty of tape on the personnel and what coaches have done at previous stops, but what it will look like on Saturday is a complete unknown.
Due to this, Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel is taking a specific approach. He is making sure the team is ready to defeat the defensive scheme that gave them so much trouble a year ago, and is then ready to adjust to anything else the Razorbacks throw at them.
“Defensively with changes they’ve made, you don’t know exactly what you’re going to see,” Heupel said. “The success that they had in their three down, three safety stuff from last year, we got to be prepared for. And that’s kind of where we’re pointing our emphasis and then react to whatever else we see and be able to adjust during the course of the football games.”
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Offensive coordinator Joey Halzle is in step with Heupel’s plan. He compared it to playing a team to open the year. You can have ideas about what they’re going to do, but until the ball is placed between the white lines, you can never know for sure.
As a result, Halzle and the offense plan to keep things ‘sound’ to start, while figuring out what Arkansas is throwing at it.
“You can never write anything off, right? You got a bunch of guys that are doing it for the first time now this season,” Halzle said. “It kind of has a feel like the first game of the year, where you have what they’ve done, what you think they’ll do, but you also have to be prepared for really anything, because they’ve had two weeks as well. They had the bye so they can get whatever they want installed and ready to go. So just early in the ball game, we’ve got to call sound football plays that you’re not getting too super specific with and just let your guys go play really fast.”
Tennessee and Arkansas will kick off at 4:15 p.m. ET on Saturday. The game will air on the SEC Network. Both teams are coming off a bye week to get healthy and prepare for the matchup.
