It’s not every day that you wonder if a head coach will wear a headset for a game but this isn’t most days at the University of Tennessee.
Following the firing of Butch Jones earlier in the week, the Vols named former Michigan and San Diego State head coach Brady Hoke as the team’s interim coach. While you normally wouldn’t think much of it, the team’s recent defensive line coach earned a little bit of a reputation for being the rare person at any level of football to not wear a headset on the sideline during his stops in Ann Arbor and beyond.
That will not be the case at Neyland Stadium as Hoke steps into Jones’ shoes as head coach however, as it appears he will don a headset to communicate with his coaches like, well, everybody else in this line of work.
“You know, it’s funny, I was just going to tell you that I am going to wear a headset,” Hoke joked on Wednesday, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. “I swear I was.”
Hoke has accurately stated his lack of wearing a headset was overblown in the past but when you’re losing football games, everything gets magnified and the head coach not doing something his 129 other peers are doing tends to become an issue. It’s good to see he’s changing up the routine for this two-game stretch with the Vols even if it won’t matter much to the fans at home with an entirely new coaching staff inbound in a few weeks.
Tennessee hosts LSU this week and Vanderbilt next Saturday to close out their season, needing to win both in order to make it to a bowl game this year after a 4-6 start.