No letting up
Tennessee Coach Josh Heupel put in his backups in the fourth quarter with the Volunteers holding a 28-point lead over Missouri, but he didn’t play conservatively on offense.
Second-team quarterback Joe Milton threw a 46-yard touchdown pass to Ramel Keyton with 5:43 left to push Tennessee’s lead to 59-24.
After the Vols forced a punt and got the ball back, Milton threw deep again to Squirrel White for a 58-yard gain to the Missouri 1 with 1:28 left.
Heupel took a timeout, then ran Dylan Sampson twice, with him scoring a touchdown with 36 seconds for the final 66-24 margin.
At least Heupel didn’t go for a 2-point conversion, as Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes once did with a big lead against Michigan.
Missouri Coach Eli Drinkwitz naturally was asked after the game about Heupel running up the score.
“He coaches his team, I coach my team,” Drinkwitz said. “So it’s our job to defend what they do. He runs his offense the way they’ve always run it.
“I’ve got no issues with their football team and what they do. That’s up to each individual head coach and he was just running his offense. I’m good. … It’s our job to flip the switch. It’s our job to not let that happen. It’s my job.”
The subject came up at Heupel’s Monday news conference when he was asked if he considered taking a knee at the Missouri 1 rather than try to score again.
“For us, at the end of the day, our twos were in the football game when the ball went down to the 1-yard line or whatever it was,” Heupel said. “It absolutely went through my mind [to take a knee], but I don’t know what the right thing to do is in that moment.
“At the end of the day, our guys continue to play football.”
Rick Neuheisel, a former college coach who was the CBS color analyst for the Missouri-Tennessee game, said the Vols’ late touchdowns should be motivation for Drinkwitz.
“Eli Drinkwitz files that away,” Neuheisel said Monday at the Knoxville Quarterback Club. “We’ll see if that ever comes back to haunt [Heupel].”
Heupel probably isn’t too worried about Missouri considering that in two meetings his Vols have outscored the Tigers 128-48 and gained 1,407 yards.