From hoping to expecting to win: If Tennessee's evolution is fully realized, Vols must beat Florida in The Swamp

NASHVILLE — Jacob Warren didn’t want to get all philosophical, and then did just that, as Tennessee’s senior tight end explained the evolution from hoping to believing and to expecting. 

“It’s something that carries over into anything,” Warren said on Day 4 of SEC Media Days. 

“If I’m just hoping, hopes and wishes are like extremely lofty to me. Ask me my goals, and I can tell you my goals, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to come true. I can hope they do. But I have to actually expect and understand that I do have what it takes to make them happen. That mentality is what we’re trying to take into every single game.”

Welcome to the mental evolution of Tennessee football under Josh Heupel. 

The Vols were one of the surprises of college football in Heupel’s first season, taking a roster ransacked by the transfer portal to a bowl game in 2021. Tennessee went 7-5 with an upset over Kentucky, but it also was just 1-3 in one-score games — letting wins against Pitt, Ole Miss and Purdue slip away. 

“After the first season with Coach Heupel everyone was like, ‘We can do something special here,’” senior defensive tackle Omari Thomas said. 

Still, on the heels of a miserable 3-7 COVID season under Jeremy Pruitt, Tennessee was still a team that simply hoped to win. The next step was believing they could win. 

“Regardless of what it looked like on the field (with Pruitt), everyone wanted to win,” Warren said. 

“Everyone thought we were good enough to win. It was just a matter of going out there and actually executing and becoming that team that truly could say every single week we expect to win. … We hadn’t proven it in the past where we could sit there and say, ‘We have every right to win this game.’

Well, we all know what happened last year, and as Thomas predicted, it was special. 

Fueled with renewed confidence by Heupel & Co., a team full of Jeremy Pruitt’s former players delivered Tennessee its best season in 20 years. The Vols beat Alabama for the first time in 15 seasons and knocked off Florida for just the second time in 18 years. They smoked LSU in Baton Rouge and pounded Clemson in the Orange Bowl. 

But according to former Vol wideout and On3 NILU President Grant Frerking, the most important win of the storybook season might’ve been an overtime victory against Pitt in Week 2. The Vols should’ve beaten the Panthers the year before, and after rallying for the win against a solid Top 25 team the next season, Frecking told me the locker room had a completely different feeling. 

The evolution with starting to shift from hope to belief. 

The Vols had circled that game as a pivot-point game on their calendar. The victory provided a jolt of momentum they took into the showdown with Florida, where they held on to beat the Gators. 

Suddenly, “We were loose and confident going to LSU,” Frecking said. 

“We had nothing to lose. We believed we could win.”

And they did. Handedly. The Vols thrashed the eventual SEC West champs 40-13, and two weeks later they ended more than a decade of misery with a cathartic, thrilling upset over Alabama to become the top-ranked team in the nation. 

"THIS IS COLLEGE FOOTBALL AT ITS ABSOLUTE BEST!"

Josh Heupel joins @JennyDell_ after an unforgettable win in Knoxville. pic.twitter.com/e7srjJdFPU

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) October 15, 2022

GROWING FROM HOPING TO BELIEVING TO EXPECTING TO WIN

At the 2022 SEC Media Days, Josh Heupel took the podium and openly talked about the growth his program needed to make from being a team that hoped to win to one expecting to win. 

“Teams that expect, they expect to win, they find a way to win because of the work they’ve put in during the offseason,” he said. 

“That’s been one of our focuses.”

Well, they’ve upped the ante this year. The Vols are leaning into heightened expectations, declaring that last season — as special as it was — still didn’t meet the program’s goals. 

“We have to keep the same mindset, but attack it harder,” said Joe Milton, who was a “passenger” in Tennessee’s mental evolution as a team but is now the “driver” of the ship as the Vols’ 2023 starting quarterback. 

“Last year was good, right? But you want to be great, so attack it harder.”

To a man, from Tennessee’s head coach to the players, all said the Vols have made that final evolutionary hurdle: They expect to win every Saturday. 

And they expect to win the SEC East in 2023. 

“We beat Florida, beat LSU, beat Missouri pretty good and you build up this confidence like, ‘Man, we’re hanging with the best of the best,” Warren said. 

“So why should it be different when we go to Tuscaloosa or when we go to Athens?”

“We talk about it at every team meeting. ‘Are you a team that hopes, believers or expects? We’re a team that expects to win,” Thomas added. 

“Everybody on this team expects to win the East.” 

The Vols, which last won the East in 2007, enter the fall with more program momentum than they’ve had any time in the last 20 years — not coincidentally the last time they won in Gainesville. Milton is viewed as a potential Day 1 NFL Draft pick. Heupel insists the Vols will be “elite defensively” this fall. 

While winning the SEC East almost certainly would require a revenge upset over the Georgia Bulldogs in late November, the program needs to handle its business against the Gators in Week 3 first. 

Tennessee looks like an ascendant program under Heupel, and even if the Vols don’t beat Georgia and fail to go to Atlanta, that doesn’t mean they’ve somehow taken a step backward if they finish 10-2. 

But if they’ve truly made that evolution from believing to expecting, they need to go to the Swamp and beat a Florida team with low expectations. They need to take care of business at home against an enigmatic Texas A&M team in mid-October. 

“I’m not sure that there’s a better time to be a Vol. You look at the trajectory of our football program, what’s happened over the last two years and where we are going …,” Heupel said. 

Tennessee has gone from a team that hopes to believes to expects, but we’ll know for sure if that transformation has been fully realized on a likely steamy afternoon in mid-September.