Josh Heupel shares how Tennessee shut down Chris Rodriguez

Tennessee dominated rival Kentucky in a way not many people expected them to. The Volunteers shut down the Wildcat offense, so when Tennessee scored Kentucky had no hope of keeping up. It was a great gameplan by Josh Heupel, which forced quarterback Will Levis into mistakes and shut down running back Chris Rodriguez.

While speaking to the media, Josh Heupel explained how Tennessee went about shutting down Kentucky’s star running back.

“It wasn’t anything [like a] complete change schematically, or anything,” Josh Heupel said. “You know, we misfit a couple of things, he got going. I mean, he got to the second level and that’s an issue when he’s got the ball in his hands. Miss fit the touchdown run.”

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Josh Heupel is referring to Kentucky’s early touchdown drive that Chris Rodriguez scored a touchdown on. According to Heupel, the issue was defensive fits and once they improved those, and got a little pressure, Tennessee was able to shut down Rodriguez.

“Came back and started playing better, just all three levels of the defense–fitting everything together. I thought in the football game, the penetration on the edge but in the interior too, forced him to bounce some things and not get started.”

Tennessee certainly figured things out after that. Other than Chris Rodriguez’s first touchdown run, Kentucky didn’t score in this game. For what could have been a trap game, that’s an incredibly impressive performance.

Next up for Josh Heupel and Tennessee is Georgia between the hedges in a Game of the Century matchup between teams ranked first and second in the AP Top 25 Poll.

Josh Heupel on Tennessee’s resurgence

Nobody expected Tennessee to be in this position. Facing scandal and a transfer portal exodus to end the Jeremy Pruitt era, it was hard to find a head coach who wanted to take the Tennessee job. Eventually, AD Danny White brought in Josh Heupel, his coach from UCF. Now, in year two, he has Tennessee on the door of the College Football Playoff, having led a remarkable resurgence.

“I don’t know if the first day that I took the job I stood up here as I was getting introduced, this is what you envision man. You start a journey that you understand the type of team that you want to build, how you want to play, everybody together, but then you’re in the nuts and bolts of just continuing to grow, and compete, and get better every day, and small decisions affect the road,” Josh Heupel said.

“But this group of individuals, this is the group of individuals that chose to stay, they wanted to be here. They’ve grown individually, just who they are, what they’re about, how they compete every day, and collectively you can see that they care about each other and once you start having a group like that you can cover a lot of ground really quickly as a football program.”