Josh Heupel addresses Tennessee's inconsistencies in passing game

During his time as an offensive coordinator and as a head coach, Joe Heupel has led some of the most explosive offenses in the country. That’s included at his most recent stop with the Tennessee Volunteers.

However, despite starting 2-0 in 2023, the passing offense has seemed out of sync at times for Tennessee. As Heupel explained, the Volunteers just need to make plays.

“End of the day, we’ve got to go make some plays,” Josh Heupel said. “That’s throwing it a little bit better. That’s catching it a little bit better. There’s big chunks of yardage in open grass for us to go make.”

This is the first full season that Tennessee has relied on Joe Milton to be its starting quarterback. He’s been around for a long time now and does a lot of things very well. However, he has dealt with accuracy issues in the past and likely should have made a couple more plays than he has this season.

“Joe would tell you he’s got to hit a couple of those. We’ve got to make the play out on the perimeter. Some subtle things, fundamentally, that can help you be more accurate with the ball, but we’ve seen them operate in that, we just didn’t execute it very well early in the football game.”

Through two weeks, Tennessee is 81st in passing offense, averaging 220 yards per game. This week, Tennessee will travel to The Swamp to take on the Florida Gators. Ahead of that game, Heupel likes how his team has responded.

“[We had] good energy out on the grass with them today but really good in the meeting room, too. Anticipated that from these guys. We have strong leadership. Guys care about their performance but they care how they get there, too,” Heupel said.

“I said it after the game — I didn’t feel like we didn’t prepare the right way. But at the end of the day, we weren’t on the right side of the competitive edge to go play the way we’re capable of. With that being said, there’s a lot of things that we did really well over the course of the game. I thought the effort, strain, energy, technique on special teams was really good and defensively we played really sound the majority of the football game.”

Tennessee has its Juggs machine set near ‘breaking your fingers’ 

There will never be a question about Joe Milton’s arm strength. He has a cannon and that can make it tough for receivers to catch the ball as he fires the ball to them. So, to simulate this, Tennessee sets its Juggs to some extreme levels.

Wide receiver Bru McCoy explained this on the Andy Staples On3 show.

“I think we’ve got it turned up about like just a threshold below breaking your fingers,” McCoy said. “It’s probably five or six on the Juggs. We always keep it high just to challenge ourselves, but definitely an emphasis on speed of the ball this year.”

Through two weeks, McCoy has seven receptions for 72 yards.