Josh Heupel said it’s the deepest the room’s ever been.
Knoxville, Tenn. – Depth across the field is beginning to become commonplace for Josh Heupel as enters his fourth season at the helm of Tennessee football.
One room that has plenty of it is the wide receiver unit.
It’s a position group filled with a number of returning veterans like Bru McCoy and Squirrel White, but it also has several newcomers that bolster the group, such as 2024 four-star Braylon Staley and five-star Mike Matthews.
Staley said it’s easy to go out and compete every day with the athletes that are in the room.
“Just coming into the receiver room that we got, coming in everybody bringing the energy, just build off one another, everybody just keeps on the same path,” said Staley.
Both receivers enrolled early and were able to participate in spring ball, so with a couple of months of Tennessee football under their belts Offensive Coordinator Joey Halzle said it’s impressive to see how their mental game and understanding of concepts has developed.
“Really excited that they can just operate because that is what keeps most freshmen off the field. It is usually not talent. It is usually not their ability to make a catch, make somebody miss, go run. It’s can they actually handle and do the right thing at the right time. These guys have shown at this point that they can. You saw from the recruiting process what those guys are physically. They’re
special players, so they have a chance to come in and keep pushing this thing,” said Halzle.
It’s a great testament to what receivers coach, Kelsey Pope, has been able to do with that unit.
It’s made for one of the more competitive rooms on the team and that’s a recurring sentiment that we hear from the coaches, iron sharpens iron.
So much so that Defensive Coordinator Tim Banks highlighted how that unit is giving the safeties all they can handle.
“We know we’ll have tremendous receivers year in and year out, you know, we feel like we’re building the backend the same way. So, the more those guys can challenge each other in practice, the better it will be for us in the long run. This is a league that has a ton of great wide receivers and the fact that we get a chance to go against some great ones in practice only helps us,” said Banks.
Heupel added, “The playmaking ability of those guys, some of the young guys being in our program multiple years, got a lot of trust in those guys. I can’t wait to see it when we get to training camp. We have guys who have a great understanding of what we are doing offensively and also have the ability to make plays and go up and attack the football and be consistent winners.”