How Tennessee built an elite defensive line to beat Georgia

Josh Heupel was clear-eyed when he landed at Tennessee in 2021.

The Vols had won only 38% of their SEC games in the previous three seasons, spending the better part of the Jeremy Pruitt era languishing in the bottom half of the SEC against the run and finishing better than 11th in defensive pressures just once over that span.

If Heupel was going to return Tennessee to SEC contention, he knew the Vols would first have to start winning on the line of scrimmage.

Enter defensive line coach Rodney Garner. With a reputation as one of the SEC’s most intense, old-school position coaches, Garner, who has coached in the SEC since 1990, was acutely aware of what it would take for Tennessee to bridge the gap with the conference’s elite defensive lines when he arrived for his second coaching stint with the Vols in 2021. He also knew such a transformation would take time, on the field and on the recruiting trail.

“We wanted to change the culture from the very essence of it,” Garner, now in his 35th season as an SEC assistant, told ESPN. “It wasn’t easy — I’ll tell you that. That first spring, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I signed up for.’ But the guys who stuck it out bought in. They saw that there was some logic behind the madness.”

Elite defensive line play is no longer just aspirational at Tennessee. Powered by six Heupel signees, four Pruitt-era holdovers and a pair of transfers, the Vols boast one of college football’s most dominant defensive lines in 2024, equipped to match the SEC’s elite as No. 7 Tennessee hits mid-November contending for its first College Football Playoff appearance.

“They play a lot of players, which allows them to play really hard and really physical,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said this week. “You can see the strain in the guys that come in to play. There’s really no drop when they go from their first-line guys to their second-line guys.”

Led by All-SEC defensive end James Pearce Jr., the unit sits at the heart of a Vols defense that enters Week 12 first among FBS programs in third-down defense (24%), fifth in scoring defense (12.6 PPG) and total yardage (271.6 YPG), and ninth in run defense (100.0 YPG). And the Vols roll deep, featuring 11 defensive linemen with at least 100 snaps played this fall, two more than any other SEC program in 2024.

As Tennessee visits No. 12 Georgia on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC), the Vols will find out whether the line they built to beat the SEC’s best can come through.

Tennessee entered the early signing period on Dec. 15, 2021, with holes to fill on the defensive line. By day’s end, the Vols had beaten Georgia to a pair of key prospects and signed four members of their 2024 defensive line rotation.

The first domino fell before 9 a.m. that Wednesday when four-star defensive tackle Tyre West flipped his commitment from Georgia to Tennessee after spending more than a year in the Bulldogs’ 2022 class. Pearce’s commitment came just a few hours later.

A relatively unheralded three-star recruit out of Charlotte, North Carolina, Pearce picked the Vols over Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. Four years later, he’s a projected first-round NFL draft selection leading Tennessee in sacks and tackles for loss.

Tennessee signed two other defensive linemen — three-stars Joshua Josephs and Jayson Jenkins — in the class of 2022. In 2023, Tennessee beat out Georgia, Alabama and other SEC foes for ESPN 300 defenders Caleb Herring and Daevin Hobbs.

All told, the Vols contended with Georgia for four of the six defensive linemen they signed in Heupel’s first two cycles with the program. All six remain key parts of Tennessee’s rotation in 2024, and, joined by transfers Jaxson Moi (Stanford) and Omarr Norman-Lott (Arizona State), new additions under Heupel make up two-thirds of the nucleus of a unit that’s pressuring opposing backfields more frequently than all but four other FBS defenses this fall.

“We have a plethora of dudes in this room,” said fifth-year defensive tackle Bryson Eason.

Eason is one of four remaining contributors who played under Pruitt, starting alongside fellow defensive line holdovers Omari Thomas and Dominic Bailey in 2024. The veteran group is important at least in part because of how Tennessee recruited on the defensive line in the years before Heupel arrived. Of the 14 high school defensive line prospects Pruitt signed across four classes 2017-20, only six remained when Heupel took over the program in 2021.

This fall, Eason, Thomas and Bailey each rank among the program’s top five in snaps, and together, alongside defensive tackle Elijah Simmons, they make up the veteran unit that withstood, and ultimately embraced, the cultural change of Garner’s defensive line room.

“It’s pretty well known that I’m not the easiest guy to play for,” Garner said. “I’m very demanding. I will make you work hard. Accountability, expectations, the standards; everything changed when we got here.”

There’s perhaps no better representative of the transformation on Tennessee’s defensive line than Bailey, the fifth-year defensive end. Struggling on the field and in the classroom, Bailey was an enigma to Garner when he arrived in 2021. Garner wasn’t sure whether Bailey was a tackle or a defensive end, and sometimes wondered whether he even wanted to be at Tennessee in the first place.

“But that kid, he just went to work,” Garner said. “He bought into what we were trying to do.”

A reserve from 2020 to 2023, Bailey has grabbed hold of the starting edge spot opposite Pearce this fall, and through nine games, his 297 snaps ranks second only to Pearce’s tally among Tennessee defensive linemen. When Alabama visited Neyland Stadium on Oct. 19, Bailey exploded, logging a career-high four tackles with two hurries and a sack in the Vols’ second win over the Crimson Tide since 2007.

“He really flipped the script on that whole story,” Garner said. “And that’s the story of our room.”

Simmons, in his sixth season at Tennessee, is the grill master of the Vols’ defensive line.

Away from the football facility, the group can often be found around a barbecue. Simmons knows his way around a spice rack, and his burgers are especially popular. “He knows what he’s doing on the grill,” Eason said. “Whether it’s [Simmons] cooking or we’re going bowling or going to the movies, we hang together outside the building.”

If the depth of this Tennessee defensive line — willing and able to go deeper than any other unit in the SEC — is its greatest strength, then the togetherness of the group is a key piece of everything that’s working up front for the Vols’ defense this fall. On fall Friday nights, you’ll find 15 or so Tennessee defensive linemen packed into one hotel room, trading turns on NBA 2K until curfew.

Entering Week 12, the leaguewide average of defensive linemen who have played 100 or more snaps on teams across the SEC is 7.1. Among the other eight SEC programs ranked alongside Tennessee in this week’s College Football Playoff rankings, only two — Ole Miss and South Carolina — have eight defensive linemen at 100 snaps or more like the Vols’ top 11.

“Everyone rotates and everyone contributes and everyone does their job,” Thomas said. “Being able to have a bunch of guys rotating allows you to play fresh; you play fast.”

Depth and rotation also mean sacrifice. And the most coveted draft prospect on the defensive line is no exception.

ESPN’s Jordan Reid lists Pearce as his second-ranked defensive end prospect for the 2025 NFL draft. But as Pearce takes the field at Georgia on Saturday, he’ll have played 320 total snaps in nine games this fall, fewer than Arkansas’ Landon Jackson (477 snaps), LSU’s Bradyn Swinson (437 snaps), Texas A&M’s Nic Scourton (397 snaps) and Penn State’s Abdul Carter (392 snaps) and a handful of other top NFL prospects at the position. Yet Pearce still leads the nation in defensive pressure percentage (22.4%), and he ranks 14th in total sacks created (seven) among FBS defenders.

After Pearce, the Vols feature nine defenders who have played somewhere between 297 and 118 snaps this fall. The balance works.

“There’s a lot of ball to be played — it’s a long 60 minutes,” Eason said. “My personal opinion, and a lot of guys share this opinion, is it’s a luxury that we can have so many guys that go in there and play up to that standard. Everyone has a role.”

A deep Tennessee defensive line was the difference-maker last month in the win over Alabama, when the Vols swarmed quarterback Jalen Milroe and held the Crimson Tide to 75 total rushing yards. Rotating 12 deep on the defensive line, Tennessee created 14 pressures before halftime, then forced another 10 as the Vols shut the door in the second half.

“We rotate the way we do so our guys stay fresh down the stretch,” Garner said. “We’re not compromising on that.”

Dominance on the defensive line has tended to dictate Tennessee’s recent meetings with Georgia, just not in the Vols’ favor. Across seven consecutive wins over Tennessee since 2017, Georgia has recorded five-plus sacks three times and created 17-plus pressures on four occasions. The Bulldogs’ average margin of victory in those seven games: 22.7.

Could this revamped Tennessee defensive line be the one to land the Vols their first victory over Georgia since Smart’s debut season? Ole Miss certainly provided a blueprint in Week 11.

The Rebels got after Carson Beck regularly last Saturday, swarming the Bulldogs quarterback for five sacks with pressures on 14 of his 38 dropbacks. Ole Miss smothered Georgia on the ground, too, limiting UGA to a season-low 59 rushing yards.

That might bode well for a Tennessee defense averaging 18.6 pressures per game in SEC play. A run defense meeting opposing rushers in the backfield on 32.6% of all rushing attempts against, the fourth-best rate in the nation, also could pose problems for Georgia.

Win at Georgia and the Vols will have a clear path to their first SEC title game since 2007 and a spot in the playoff next month. But through a broader lens, there’s a sense that Tennessee is now built to contend atop the SEC consistently, particularly on the defensive line.

The Vols will almost certainly lose Pearce to the NFL. Additionally, Thomas and Simmons are out of eligibility after this season, while Eason and Norman-Lott could return for one more season. It’s possible Tennessee will look entirely different on the line next fall.

However, Garner is confident in what lies ahead for the Vols.

Moi, the Stanford transfer, has emerged as a contributor in his first season, and Tennessee should return the bulk of its defensive depth next fall with second-year pass rusher Tyree Weathersby and freshman Jordan Ross, ESPN’s No. 24 overall prospect in the 2024 cycle, ready to enter the rotation in 2025, as well. The Vols, whose 2025 recruiting class is ranked 10th overall, also have three four-star defensive line commits in their 2025 class, including ESPN 300 tackle Ethan Utley.

In 2024, the Vols have the kind of defensive line Heupel and Garner envisioned when they arrived four years ago. And the future up front at Tennessee looks plenty bright, too.

“We just have so many guys that have just bought in,” Garner said. “This is the way we do things. And we’re not changing.”