Is Coach Heupel a lifetime contract kind of guy?

#27
#27
Rocky Top T said:
Heupel is better than Fulmer.
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Not yet, he's not.

You are what you do. Fulmer has 2 SEC and one national title. Heupel doesn't yet. Until he does, Fulmer has the better legacy.

You can argue "but Heupel's smarter, he's prettier, he knows football better, he cares more, he has a prettier wife, he weighs less..." on and on all day. These are details. In fact, they are cherry-picked details to support your bias. Zoom out. Zoom waaay out. All the details fade into the fabric of the whole, and the whole is: 152-52, 2 SEC titles, 1 national title, versus 38-15, no titles. Yet.

I truly hope, it is my fervent wish, that Josh Heupel ends up being either the best or the second-best coach in Tennessee history. Really want this to happen.

But he's not yet.

Go Vols!
 
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#30
#30
VFL-82-JP said:
I get the impression Heupel isn't driven by money first and foremost. I mean, sure it's important to him, to provide for his family and live a nice life...but I think his primary motivation is a quest for excellence. A need to leave a legacy, the very best he can. "The money's nice, too," if you know what I mean. But he's going after something to do with his father, and his playing days, and his early coaching years, particularly being fired by Bob Stoops, and an itch that he can do this job as good as anyone else, maybe even better, an itch to get ever closer to perfection. All of those elements are buried down in the bedrock that makes up the core of who Josh Heupel is.

Don't get me wrong, he would probably like to have a lifetime contract, and yes, it might make him a bit more complacent than he would be without. But I doubt much. He's chasing different dreams and different ghosts.

Go Vols!
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Your second paragraph is, to me, the most important point. You want to help keep him motivated and not set him up to become complacent.
 
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#33
#33
Rocky Top T said:
You believe what you want.
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You compare Heupel at year 5 to Fulmer at year 16 as if Heupel is guaranteed to be good in a decade. Very few football coaches hold on that long at a high level. Fulmer’s longevity and achievements make him our second best coach ever, and it’s not really close. It would take Heupel another decade and a bunch of accomplishments that he likely will never achieve to match Fulmer.
 
#34
#34
VFL-82-JP said:
Not yet, he's not.

You are what you do. Fulmer has 2 SEC and one national title. Heupel doesn't yet. Until he does, Fulmer has the better legacy.

You can argue "but Heupel's smarter, he's prettier, he knows football better, he cares more, he has a prettier wife, he weighs less..." on and on all day. These are details. In fact, they are cherry-picked details to support your bias. Zoom out. Zoom waaay out. All the details fade into the fabric of the whole, and the whole is: 152-52, 2 SEC titles, 1 national title, versus 38-15, no titles. Yet.

I truly hope, it is my fervent wish, that Josh Heupel ends up being either the best or the second-best coach in Tennessee history. Really want this to happen.

But he's not yet.

Go Vols!
Click to expand...
If I'm starting a team today, I'll take Heupel over Fulmer. Cutcliffe carried Fulmer. I think Fulmer would be a .500 coach in today's game in SEC play
 
#35
#35
LegionnaireOfTheMiserable said:
You compare Heupel at year 5 to Fulmer at year 16 as if Heupel is guaranteed to be good in a decade. Very few football coaches hold on that long at a high level. Fulmer’s longevity and achievements make him our second best coach ever, and it’s not really close. It would take Heupel another decade and a bunch of accomplishments that he likely will never achieve to match Fulmer.
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Fulmer also took over a very good team, Heupel did not. Fulmer won more with cutcliffe, not so much without him. Today's SEC is much stronger than when Fulmer coached. Fulmer had enough talent to win 3-4 championships. In today's game I will take Heupel over Fulmer any day. I also think Heupel is a good coach, not a great one yet. Fulmer screwed this university twice. You love on him all you want, I'm not crazy about him
 
#36
#36
volfan2024 said:
He seems to have his ducks in a row. We have three great coaches at UT currently. Baseball basketball included. I’d seriously consider them all well Barnes already in.
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He strikes me as the type that isn't going to leave to go elsewhere if we are rolling 10-2 consistently. He's also in a good spot if Kirby eventually moves to the NFL if he gets tired at Georgia. The Georgia drop off would be similar to Bama's so there would be a void in the SEC.
 
#37
#37
Rocky Top T said:
If I'm starting a team today, I'll take Heupel over Fulmer. Cutcliffe carried Fulmer. I think Fulmer would be a .500 coach in today's game in SEC play
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Of course you would because the prestige of schools historically don't really matter now. It is all about the money. No one really cares about traditions as a recruiting pitch now. That's why a lot of these long time coaches left the game in mass. Not just in football, but basketball as well.
 
#41
#41
Rocky Top T said:
Fulmer also took over a very good team, Heupel did not. Fulmer won more with cutcliffe, not so much without him. Today's SEC is much stronger than when Fulmer coached. Fulmer had enough talent to win 3-4 championships. In today's game I will take Heupel over Fulmer any day. I also think Heupel is a good coach, not a great one yet. Fulmer screwed this university twice. You love on him all you want, I'm not crazy about him
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Fulmer’s winning percentage without Cutcliffe is better than Johnny Majors’ winning percentage. Fulmer is a Hall of Famer who brought you the only national championship you’ll ever see, be thankful for that. 99% of coaches get fired eventually. It happening after 16 years, 152 wins, and a national championship is a big win, and penalizing him for taking over a good program that he was instrumental in building is not the point that you and others of your persuasion think it is.
 
#42
#42
Rocky Top T said:
I think Fulmer would be a .500 coach in today's game in SEC play
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Every coach is a product of his time, and can't be taken out of context. As just one example, Saban might have been pedestrian if plopped down in the era of General Neyland.* There's just no telling.

A championship coach is a championship coach. And no matter how much some here want to take that away from our former coaches, they can't. [and not just the coach, you belittle our entire program of that era when you say 'they weren't that good'].

Go Vols!



* Nick Saban is widely believed to have given himself two major advantages that made him a multi-championship coach: he brought in overwhelming talent (whether passing money under the table or some other way is a different conversation), and he instilled extremely tight discipline in his squads. Well, money wasn't available in the inter-war years due to the Great Depression, and back then EVERY football coach instilled heavy discipline. Would Saban have stood out? Possibly not. He may have been just another average coach in those days.
 
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#44
#44
Keeping a coach past their expiration date is never a good idea.

We’d end up making a rushed hire and get some young guy who wouldn’t understand the opportunity he had. Likely followed by one bad hire after another for about 15 years.
 
#45
#45
LegionnaireOfTheMiserable said:
Fulmer’s winning percentage without Cutcliffe is better than Johnny Majors’ winning percentage. Fulmer is a Hall of Famer who brought you the only national championship you’ll ever see, be thankful for that. 99% of coaches get fired eventually. It happening after 16 years, 152 wins, and a national championship is a big win, and penalizing him for taking over a good program that he was instrumental in building is not the point that you and others of your persuasion think it is.
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I refuse to accept that 1998 is the only national championship we will ever see at TN
 
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#47
#47
Fulmer had the benefit of being HC when the rest of the league was down. He beat up in pre Saban Alabama and a down Georgia program. Of course had massive problems with Florida. The Cutcliffe left and the long downhill slide began.
And we all can point to the exact moment when the breakdown became impossible to ignore.
IMG_2568.jpeg
 
#49
#49
I agree it is not lifetime contract time for Heupel. But we better keep extending his contract and giving him raises as long as he keeps performing.
It is amazing when you think that he got us to 10 wins last year with what we now know was a limited quarterback and no passing attack to speak of. We even had three straight games with zero points in the entire first half. But we still made the playoffs. And he had the fortitude to stand up to the Nico family ultimatum and let every know that no one is bigger than the program. In the NIL world; that took some guts.
Now that recruiting is on fire and we have built up depth in the trenches; the next few years have the POTENTIAL to be something special. Just my $0.02
 
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