Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel met with the media for just over seven minutes on Saturday night after the Vols’ 19-14 loss to Arkansas.
Heupel touched on several topics during his interview: the final play of the game, pinpointing Tennessee’s biggest struggle on offense, an assessment of Nico Iamaleava’s play, a breakdown of what Arkansas was doing well, so on and so forth.
If you want to see Heupel’s full press conference from Monday, it can be found here.
To close out the press conference, though, Heupel took a broad question about the locker room after the game. The Vols’ fourth-year head coach was asked about his message to the team after a deflating loss like the one suffered on Saturday night to the unranked Razorbacks.
“Man, pretty simple,” Heupel said. “When moments like this happen, the outside world’s gonna have a narrative for you. We talk about it when it’s going good, and tonight it didn’t go good. You gotta look at your teammates in the eye. Those are the opinions that matter. You gotta continue to pull the rope harder. We gotta continue to grow. Good teams get better throughout the course of the year. Still have a chance to be a really good football team.”
More from RTI: Are Tennessee Football’s Offensive Issues Fixable?
Tennessee is going to have to buckle down and reset here with a tough stretch coming up in the next few weeks, though the Vols do return to Rocky Top for a long home stretch next. Tennessee doesn’t have another open date until the final weekend of October and will need to make their offensive adjustments and defensive tweaks with Florida and Alabama staring down the Vols in the next two weeks.
“End of the day, starting with me, it wasn’t good enough tonight,” Heupel said after the game on Saturday. “And between all three phases, we’ve got to find a way to be on the right side of the scoreboard. And we got to get better. So at this point, you got an opportunity to come together, pull harder, fight stronger, play for each other, and continue to grow. Still a lot out there, obviously, as everybody sees. But the main thing is we got to continue to get better.”
Tennessee (4-1, 1-1 SEC) will host Florida (3-2, 1-1 SEC) in Neyland Stadium this Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. ET.
