Matt Wells was just a 25-year-old position coach at Navy when he trekked west to Oklahoma to visit his younger brother, Luke, then a student assistant with the Sooners under first-year coach Bob Stoops. Luke Wells was giving his brother a tour of the team facility and stadium when they happened upon an empty hallway. One light was on, and Luke told his brother they ought to turn it off.
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Preseason camp was still weeks away. It was a late Friday afternoon in the summer. Both assumed the room had long been empty, inexplicably wasting electricity.
They peered their heads inside and found senior quarterback Josh Heupel, one of the lone souls in the mostly empty facility during one of the quietest times of the year. Tennessee’s new head coach, who threw 30 touchdown passes in 1999 to help Oklahoma go 7-5 in Stoops’ first season, was watching film alone in advance of his senior year.
“He’s a grinder, studies the game,” Matt Wells said. “He’s not in the building watching tape and announcing his presence to everybody. He’s just, ‘I’m going to go about my work and be a grinder.’”
Five months later, Heupel sat atop teammates’ shoulders on a January night in Miami, celebrating a national title to cap an undefeated season in which he finished second in the Heisman voting.
Matt Wells never forgot that trip to Oklahoma as he watched Heupel ascend the coaching ranks as a longtime assistant under Stoops. Fifteen years after their chance encounter at Oklahoma, Wells found himself in need of an offensive coordinator in 2015 after Kevin McGiven left to become Oregon State’s quarterbacks coach.
Back in Oklahoma, Heupel found himself in need of a new start after Stoops fired him following the 2014 season, a day Stoops called the hardest of his career in a recent memoir. Heupel spent nine years coaching quarterbacks, including his final four seasons calling plays. For a while, Heupel looked like he fit the bill as Stoops’ eventual successor. Then suddenly, he didn’t.
Wells and Heupel had kept in touch. Just a year earlier, Wells returned to Norman for several days to talk offense with Heupel. He knew their football minds mostly aligned. They both believed in fast-paced offenses that took shots downfield and did so with varied personnel groupings and varied formations.
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So as Heupel pondered his future, Wells called him and made a pitch.
“Can we make this fit? Does he want to come to Logan, Utah? Do him and Dawn (Heupel) want to come do this?” Wells said. “It was more of that than an interview.”
Heupel decided to return to the state where his playing career started when he was a freshman at Weber State and transferred to Snow College, a junior college in Ephraim, Utah., before Stoops brought him to Oklahoma.
“It was an awesome opportunity for me, my wife and my family just to enjoy that experience out there and go compete at a high level and grow,” Heupel said.
A year later, Heupel was back in the Power 5 at Missouri.
Wells had an opportunity to reboot his offense.
“We wanted something different, a unique perspective,” Wells said.
He wanted to keep many of the same offensive concepts that fueled the Aggies’ 10-win season in 2014, but he needed something new, too.
“We went outside our box,” said Jovon Bouknight, who was the passing game coordinator and receivers coach at the time and now coaches Kentucky’s receivers.
Heupel brought a wide variance of RPOs to the 2015 Utah State offense, as well as new play-action concepts Wells had never used before. He did much of it out of 11 personnel, or one running back, one tight end and three wide receivers.
Defensive coordinator Kevin Clune, now at BYU, didn’t know Heupel, but he knew former teammates of Heupel at Snow College. He’d watched him play for the Sooners, too.
“He knew what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it,” Clune said. “He’s the kind of guy you want in charge because he has a calm control over what he’s doing.”
The Aggies returned fifth-year senior quarterback Chuckie Keeton, who Kent Myers replaced for much of the season after Keeton missed six games with an injury.
Heupel changed some of the offense’s terminology, even when he kept near-identical concepts from the previous year, something Wells gave him the freedom to do. As Heupel installed new offensive concepts before and during the season, he did so carefully, and in a way offensive line coach Mark Weber called “O-line friendly.”
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“Some guys just keep adding things without any concern with how the offensive line might handle it,” Weber said. “He was always the one who’d ask, ‘Hey Web, can they handle this? Can they handle that?’ One change or addition can screw up five different things.”
Heupel rarely, if ever, talked explicitly about his time at Oklahoma. He made a point of spending time with coaches away from the facility. Todd Orlando, who Heupel spoke to earlier this year in hopes of convincing him to leave USC to become Tennessee’s defensive coordinator, had been the Aggies defensive coordinator in 2013 and 2014. Heupel rented Orlando’s house in Logan when he took the Utah State job, and he would frequently have coaches over to cook out, play horseshoes or cornhole and relax. It wasn’t until Heupel took over the residence that Weber had even set foot in the home Orlando owned.
“He got out of the pressure cooker,” Weber said. “He got out of a tough situation. He was just one of the guys. He wasn’t Josh Heupel. He was just one of the coaches. I loved my time at Utah State and it’s a great place, and I don’t know what his salary was at Oklahoma, but I’m sure it was more than it was at Utah State. It was probably half. at least. I mean, that’s a tough pill to swallow. He never talked about that stuff. He was just coaching ball.”
In his ninth season at Oklahoma, Heupel earned $605,000 as the Sooners’ co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. As Utah State’s associate head coach, offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, he earned a base salary of $232,420.
Heupel called plays in both jobs.
“The outside attention, right? The fan base is a little bit different size and density, for sure,” Heupel said. “I think as much as anything, it was an opportunity for me to kind of sit back and get back to who and what I want to do offensively, what we’re going to be about and push forward from there.”
The season itself was uneven. It featured highs like routing a top-25 Boise State team 52-26, led by two coaches who are now Heupel’s peers. Broncos head coach Bryan Harsin now coaches Auburn. Offensive coordinator Eli Drinkwitz leads Missouri, a division rival.
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“We targeted our strength really well,” Bouknight said. “That’s one thing Heup does really well, identifying who are strong pieces and key components to the offense. Then let’s try to utilize them and attack.”
But a week later, the Aggies scored just 14 points in a 34-point loss to San Diego State, the eventual conference champion. By season’s end, Utah State was 6-6 with a 5-3 mark in Mountain West play, good for a three-way tie for second in its division. The season ended with a loss to Akron in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
Still, Heupel made an impression on other Utah State coaches.
“He just brought a different type of energy to our staff. A more relaxed feel. We had a lot of fun around the office, but we stayed focused and stayed busy,” Bouknight said. “It was a spark we needed, man. He was that spark that got everybody going. Not that meetings are always enjoyable, but it was one of those vibes where you’re watching film and it was way more relaxed and chill and not as uptight as some of the other places I’ve been.”
Heupel’s players at UCF said they rarely, if ever, saw him raise his voice for an extended period at players. Weber said he must have changed after he became a head coach.
“He’d cut it loose,” Weber said. “Sometimes, quarterbacks get treated with kid gloves. He treated them more like offensive linemen.”
And though Heupel’s stop at Utah State was brief, he was integral in Jordan Love’s recruitment. Heupel identified Love and made him a priority in recruiting. Love signed with the Aggies as the No. 70 pro-style quarterback in the 247Sports Composite and a three-star prospect. He left as a first-round pick.
“He does a nice job of simplifying a complicated game,” Wells said. “He tries to get quarterbacks’ eyes in the right direction, simplify their thinking and being very repetitive in terms of thinking, route progressions, reads and keys and what they need to know for each play.”
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When Heupel was putting together his staff on Rocky Top, he used Wells as a sounding board, asking for some advice and insight into candidates he was considering. The two have kept in touch since Heupel moved on to Missouri after just one season with Utah State, getting his career back on track.
Now, Heupel is back in a new pressure cooker with Tennessee in the SEC, at a job no one has held for more than five seasons since Phillip Fulmer resigned in 2008.
“I was just happy to see him take a situation that was one of the low points of his life and rebound and grind and get back to having a lot of success,” Wells said. “He’s earned it.”
(Photo: Jackson Laizure / Getty Images)
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