Suffice to say, not many Tennessee football fans anticipated Josh Heupel as the “big hire”.
Weeks after the firing of Jeremy Pruitt and Phil Fulmer’s “retirement”, it looked like Tennessee was going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, so to speak. No one could tell you exactly where Tennessee was leaning with the search, and athletic director Danny White’s famed ability to hire coaches brought a certain mystique to the process. Were they going to snatch up another school’s head coach? Were they going to make a splash with one of the up-and-coming candidates of the industry?