Oklahoma firing led Josh Heupel to Tennessee

Getting fired sucks. 

No matter how the person delivering the news tries to soften the blow — and no matter the extenuating circumstances that forced the decision — it feels like a knife to the chest. The desire to immediately go to work for the competition and drive that ungrateful, idiotic organization out of business springs from that wound and burns hot.

I doubt Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops gave the Ryan Bingham speech when he fired Josh Heupel in January 2015. Who’s Bingham? He’s George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air, the consultant whose profession is firing people.

“Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are right now,” Bingham tells an employee who is losing his job in the movie. “And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it. That’s the truth.”

The words are presented in the film as BS, something the consultant says to defuse a potentially volatile situation. But in quite a few cases, they’re true. They certainly were with Heupel and Oklahoma. Getting fired by the Sooners helped lead him to where he is now. Saturday, it will lead him back to Norman. Heupel will make his return as Tennessee’s coach in Oklahoma’s first conference game as a member of the SEC. It’s a monumental event on both sides, but it’s a lot more personal for one of them.

Heupel probably wouldn’t be leading the Volunteers if he hadn’t gotten fired by Oklahoma. That trauma pushed him on a vision quest that ultimately will lead him back with a chance to shove it in the faces of those who once thought he wasn’t good enough.

Of course, time has changed much. Stoops is retired, and having six-plus years of head-coaching experience of his own probably has made Heupel more empathetic regarding his former boss’s decision. The Sooners are led by Brent Venables, who had a somewhat similar experience (before Heupel’s firing) that pushed him out of Norman and ultimately brought him back. 

Stoops, then Oklahoma’s head coach, fired offensive coordinator Heupel after a miserable 40-6 loss to Clemson in the Russell Athletic Bowl ended Oklahoma’s 2014 season. Oklahoma had at that point gone five seasons without winning the Big 12 title. (The league considered the 2012 title shared with Kansas State, but Kansas State beat the Sooners head-to-head and went to the better bowl.) The Sooners had won five of the previous seven before that stretch. An offense that had once shredded nearly every defense it faced had grown stale. It could move the ball against average opponents, but it left Oklahoma helpless against better defenses.

The firing wasn’t unexpected, but it floored Heupel. It crushed Stoops, too. Heupel was the quarterback who led Stoops’ 2000 national title team. Heupel had worked his way up the ladder from graduate assistant to OC. For years, he’d felt like the chosen one who ultimately would succeed Stoops. He was family. In his memoir, Stoops wrote that “firing Josh was the worst day of my 18 years as the head coach at OU.”

It came after a miserable performance against former Oklahoma co-worker Brent Venables, who had built a ferocious defense at Clemson. Venables had been Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator but had left Norman following the 2011 season when it became clear Stoops wanted his brother Mike to run the defense following the latter’s firing as Arizona’s head coach. Venables turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle for Dabo Swinney’s Clemson program. Two seasons after beating Oklahoma in that Russell Athletic Bowl, the Tigers beat Alabama to win the first of two national titles in three seasons. Venables’ contribution to that mini-dynasty — on the field and on the recruiting trail — led Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione to hire Venables to replace Lincoln Riley when Riley left for USC after the 2021 season.

Needless to say, Heupel didn’t agree with Stoops’ decision in 2015. He stayed in contact with former teammates, but any official connection with Oklahoma disintegrated. The last QB to lead Oklahoma to a national title wanted nothing more to do with the Sooners.

What he wanted to do was continue on his journey to becoming a head coach. It wouldn’t be some clean succession plan with a coronation on some future date in Norman. Heupel would have to claw his way there. 

Meanwhile, Stoops replaced Heupel with Riley, then a 31-year-old offensive coordinator at East Carolina. Oklahoma’s offense immediately improved and the Sooners started a run of six consecutive Big 12 titles. Stoops won two of those. Riley won the next four after becoming the successor everyone assumed Heupel would be.

While Riley assumed the path originally set forth for Heupel, Heupel rose back through the ranks by adopting the offense that forced Stoops to rethink everything at Oklahoma. The Sooners’ biggest issue in Heupel’s final seasons in Norman was Baylor. The Bears won the Big 12 in 2013 and infamously split the title with TCU in 2014 (Baylor won the head-to-head) thanks to coach Art Briles’ Veer and Shoot offense, a scheme hatched in the Texas high school ranks that blended coach Bill Yeoman’s Houston Veer run game with ultra-wide receiver splits that forced defenses to declare their intentions before the snap. 

Heupel spent the 2015 season with Matt Wells at Utah State. He didn’t stay long, but he left behind a gift that continues to give. During his year there, Heupel became enamored with the game tape of a Bakersfield, Calif., quarterback. The kid came to Utah State’s camp, and Heupel told Wells the Aggies needed to sign him. Heupel never got to coach Jordan Love in Logan, but he’s the reason the current Green Bay Packers’ starter wound up there.

Heupel’s next stop was Missouri, working for Barry Odom. This is where Heupel really began to incorporate the Veer and Shoot. Briles — who was fired from Baylor in the spring of 2016 because of a scandal regarding his handling of sexual assault allegations against players — and his staff had kept the scheme largely a secret. They didn’t teach it much at clinics, and they shied away from letting other staffs visit to share ideas. But Heupel had his sources. To coach tight ends, Heupel hired former Sooners tight end Joe Jon Finley, who had spent 2015 at Baylor as an offensive quality control analyst. Heupel also had remained friends with former Oklahoma player and student coach Jeff Lebby*, Briles’ son-in-law and assistant who helped craft the offense at multiple stops.

*Pretty much everyone in this story except for Jordan Love connects at multiple points. Lebby later worked for Heupel at UCF and was Venables’ OC at Oklahoma until he was hired to be Mississippi State’s head coach this past offseason.

In 2015, Missouri’s offense ranked No. 125 in the nation in yards per play (4.4). In Heupel’s first season, the Tigers jumped to No. 13 (6.4). They leaped to No. 6 (7.1) in 2017 as Drew Lock threw for 3,964 yards and 44 touchdowns and Ish Witter and Larry Rountree III combined to run for 1,752 yards on 5.6 yards a carry.

Despite those gaudy numbers, Heupel didn’t make many potential head-coaching lists. Jobs came open, but he didn’t get mentioned. That changed as UCF officials searched for a replacement for Scott Frost, who got the Nebraska job after leading the Knights to an undefeated season. Nearly every hot head coach in the Group of 5 and every hot coordinator in the power conferences wanted to come to Orlando and take over the roster of a team that had gone 13-0 and was bringing almost everyone back. The hot board lists for that job included a lot of well known names. Not a single one named Heupel.

A consultant threw out Heupel’s name in a meeting, and then-UCF athletic director Danny White knew exactly who to call. His brother Brian was an associate athletic director at Missouri at the time. Danny called Brian, and Brian offered a glowing report from his Missouri co-workers. The theme, essentially, was that Danny might have come across a gem that no one else even considered.

Danny White set up an interview with Heupel, and after that he knew. Heupel laid out a plan of what he’d be as a head coach and how he’d harness that stocked roster. And he did. He went 28-8 in three seasons at UCF. In the process, he identified and signed — with some help from Knights QB McKenzie Milton — Hawaiian QB Dillon Gabriel.

IDing Heupel was yet another win for White, who had hired football coach Lance Leipold and basketball coach Nate Oats while the AD at Buffalo. That track record helped White get the AD job at Tennessee, and he stepped into a mess. The Volunteers had fired coach Jeremy Pruitt for cause and forced out athletic director (and former coach) Phillip Fulmer. Tennessee players were pouring into the transfer portal, and the job seemed like a reclamation project that would take years.

White, who doesn’t believe in Year Zero situations, surveyed all of the available coaches and decided the guy he just left behind in Orlando was better than all of them. The Heupel hire was anything but popular among Vols’ fans when it happened, but White wasn’t worried. If Heupel was the same guy at Tennessee that he was at UCF, he’d start winning and they’d be happy.

And he did. Heupel won 10 games in year two and snapped a 15-game losing streak to Alabama. Tennessee took a step back last year, but the ascension of QB Nico Iamaleava and the most complete defense of the Heupel era has the Vols thinking College Football Playoff.

With apologies to the fictional Ryan Bingham, it sure looks as if Heupel is building an empire. He certainly has changed Tennessee’s football world after more than a decade of dysfunction.

And now he’ll return to the place where he was once told he wasn’t good enough. He’d love to leave with a win, but he’s not mad anymore. 

“I wouldn’t be here today at Tennessee if I didn’t have all those experiences,” Heupel said. “So, tremendously grateful for all those people.”