The 2021 Tennessee Offense

       The Tennessee Volunteers had a rebirth in the 2021 college football season.  This rebirth led to a 7-6 overall record and a trip to the Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tennessee.  The rebirth of this program is centered around Head Coach Josh Heupel and his dynamic offense that he brought to Knoxville, Tennessee.  The offense that Tennessee has built under first year offensive coordinator Alex Golesh ranked number nine in the nation this year.  Over a 13 game span Tennessee ran 952 offensive plays that gained 6,174 yards.  They averaged 6.49 yards per play for the entire season.  The offense also accounted for 63 total touchdowns and averaged 474.9 yards per game.

       This offensive success is what led to our study of the Volunteer offense.  We wanted to know what makes them tick.  What we uncovered from our study was actually pretty surprising to us.  Tennessee strives to play with a break-neck pace when they are on offense.  Because of their up tempo offense they are able to average 73 plays a game.  This speed clearly causes problems for many opposing defenses because it will quickly wear you down as a defender.  

The second aspect of the Tennessee offense that we quickly noticed, and loved, is how they use horizontal space on the field.  The splits that they incorporate for their wide receivers force a defense to spread out much wider than they are accustomed to.  Tennessee does not just widen out their wide receivers as a window dressing, they have certain plays that are called to take advantage of how a defense reacts to this creation of extra space.  

The third thing we found is that Tennessee is very simple in what they do.  The Volunteers do not carry a lot of different schemes into a game.  Rather than schemes they rely on the tempo that they play with along with their unique horizontally stretched formations to keep a defense off balance.  This is not to say that they are a very generic, cookie cutter offense; they are far from it.  Tennessee likes to fully develop their schemes and find multiple ways to run the same play that shows their creativity as a coaching staff.  For example, their favorite run play from the season was counter.  They presented this scheme to defenses in nine different ways.  The offensive line was still blocking the same base scheme but they found as many ways as possible to dress the play up.  This creativity is one thing we believe sets Tennessee apart and why we chose to study them.
 

      When reading through this PDF we hope you are able to appreciate the Tennessee offense like we have grown to.  The goal of this PDF is to help coaches and fans better understand what one of the top ten offenses in the country is doing that leads to their success.  We hope that you are able to either incorporate some of the things that makes the Volunteer offense so successful into your team's offense or that you at least leave with a better understanding of the offense that Josh Huepel and Alex Golesh have built.