VFL Corner: Joey Kent on Tennessee’s trajectory, Alabama controversies and UT’s relationship with VFLs (2024)

Earlier this week, Joey Kent welcomed Tennessee receiver Jauan Jennings to the program’s top 10 list in all-time receptions.

No one was more suitable to send the message: Kent, who played from 1992-96, is the Vols’ all-time leader in receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns. This week, he took time out with The Athletic for a wide-ranging interview that covered the controversies from last week at Alabama, his relationships with current players and the program itself and the trajectory under Jeremy Pruitt.

Author’s note: Portions of this interview were edited for length and clarity.

I saw your video this week to Jauan Jennings. I’m sure plenty of others did as well. How did that all come together?

Clay (Bollinger) from the Vol football Twitter reached out to me a couple days ago. I was actually in Knoxville on Monday for Judy Jackson’s memorial. And he reached out to me then and asked me to congratulate Jauan on his accomplishment. That’s big time for him. I was talking to Coach (Phillip) Fulmer on Monday about him specifically, and he told me, “You just don’t know how far he’s come.”

Dear Jauan,

Welcome to the Top 10! 👏

From,
The 🐐 pic.twitter.com/IoeqJcg00O

— Tennessee Football (@Vol_Football) October 22, 2019

I don’t know him. I met him a couple, a few times. I don’t know him well, but I know his story and I know he’s come a long way personally. Even on the field, he’s come a long way. He’s not the fastest guy. He doesn’t run the best routes. But he’s a football player. He’s one of the toughest guys, if not the toughest guy on the team. He’s considered a leader. And he makes a lot of plays for the team. He does everything you ask for as a football player at the University of Tennessee, and I’m just so proud of him, for where he’s come from, where he is now and everything he’s accomplished.

How do Jauan and Marquez Callaway stack up for you in terms of all-time 1-2 punches at receiver in this program?

It’s kind of an unfair question to me, because of all the transitions they’ve had to go through between head coaches, offensive coordinators, position coaches. All that plays a part.

For me, when I was there, I had two position coaches. I had Kippy Brown, who I consider one of the best position coaches I’ve ever had. And I had Pat Washington my last two years. There was stability there, and I had David Cutcliffe the entire time I was there. And it didn’t hurt that I had one of the best quarterbacks ever throwing me the ball for three years. And prior to that, I had Heath Shuler. I had an embarrassment of riches while I was there. It was just perfect timing for me. You had a young quarterback in Peyton Manning; I was a sophom*ore when he was a freshman. And we just connected. We had a really good run for three years together. We also had some really good receivers alongside me with Peerless Price, Marcus Nash, Andy McCullough. We had a lot of great talent around us. That offense was prolific during that time.

When you’re in it, I wouldn’t say you take it for granted, but we were just having so much fun. It was just kind of the way it’s supposed to be, because we had a great quarterback, a great offensive line. Jay Graham was running the ball, and he’s one of the best backs in the country at that time. We had all the ingredients.

So it’s kind of unfair to them because of all the transition they’ve gone through. But talent-wise, Quez can stack up with anybody, with his height, size, speed, his ability to time jumps. I wish he would have gotten more of a chance to showcase his talents a little bit more over the last three or four years, but I think he’ll be fine at the next level. I think he’s going to test out well this spring with his size and speed, and I think he’ll go on to be a good pro, as well as Jauan. He has a lot to offer NFL teams as far as his physicality. Special teams, he can go make plays. A lot of these teams are looking for guys who aren’t afraid and can take hits and do a lot of the things on special teams that not a lot of people want to do. But I think he’ll be a willing participant at that next level.

How much contact do you have with current players?

You know, it’s difficult for me to get to Knoxville a lot. We touched on it when we first started talking about my situation with my family life and my kids and everybody’s so active, I get to Knoxville maybe once or twice in the summer and once or twice during the season.

So I don’t have a lot of contact, but when I do, I try to make it impactful.

I haven’t played there in over 20 years, so I don’t even know how much these guys know about me or the teams in the ’90s. It’s a different time, man. Some of these kids weren’t even born when I was there. So how much they know about those offenses back then or me, I don’t know. Obviously, they can do some research and Tee Martin is there, so he can talk about when I was there or he was there and spread that knowledge, but I don’t know how much they know. I think the respect is there, because anytime you wear the orange and white, we’re all brothers even though we’re all different generations and decades.

I wish I had more contact, but it’s just kind of life getting in the way sometimes. That’s just how things have unfolded the last few years.

What’s your best Peyton story?

(Laughs.) The best Peyton story is something I probably shouldn’t say, so I’m not going to say it. But it happened after the season and it was one of his graduation gifts to me. We had a good time walking up and down The Strip and enjoying what the old strip had to offer in terms of bars and restaurants. So I’m just going to leave it at that.

But some that stick out to me were just all the work we put in during the summer time. We put in so much time during the summer. It was obviously not mandatory, but it was kind of mandatory for us. Obviously, coaches couldn’t mandate that. I was in charge of the receivers. He was in charge of the quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends and the amount of time we worked, doing just 1-on-1 with the DBs, working 7-on-7, routes vs. air, that’s how we got so consistent during the season, because we worked so hard during the offseason.

How many hours a week during the summers and offseason are we talking here?

You have your regular workouts and your conditioning and the stuff that’s mandated from the strength and conditioning coaches, but we’re talking another hour or hour and a half outside of that, at least three or four times a week.

And sometimes it wouldn’t be that long. Sometimes it’d just be me and him or me and a couple receivers or something, but we were always working to try and get better. This work ethic came from (Peyton). I thought I had a pretty good work ethic until I met Peyton and the time he kind of demanded. And after a certain point, you felt like it was just something that we did, because we knew this was something that was going to help us during the season, to get our timing down.

And so a lot of the plays, like the first play of the Alabama game, we just looked at each other and we knew what was going to happen because of all the work we put in that summer. We’d seen that look before, either in practice or during 7-on-7. We knew what the other was going to do and the expectation on that play of where I should be. A lot of the plays that happened on Saturdays, we repped those plays 1,000 times during the summer.

What did those teams and the best ones that came after you guys have that the teams in the last decade at Tennessee have not had?

No. 1: Consistency. When you talk about four head coaches in the last 10 years, all that trickles down as far as position coaches, offensive coordinators. I think that’s the biggest thing. Coach Fulmer had a consistent staff and we had a talented staff, if you look at some of the guys who have left Tennessee and become head coaches, coordinators and position coaches, there’s a lot of talent on that staff. And it all really comes down to talent, too. And competition.

When I came to Tennessee in ’92, I didn’t have a lot of stats, I wasn’t an All-American or this and that, so I knew I was going to sit when I first got there. I was only 6-foot-1, 160 pounds, so that in itself put me in a situation where I was going to be redshirted. But it was just a lot of talent and competition.

With the sophom*ores, juniors and seniors in front of me, we saw what good looked like on a day-to-day basis. Corey Fleming was the receiver I played behind. And the way he played the game, the way he practiced, and you look at Craig Faulkner, too. There were just so many guys that showed us what good looked like.

When you don’t have the same talent level as we did back in the early ’90s or after us, you don’t have that same example every day of what you should do.

Coaches can teach you technique and show you what you should do, but if you see it and visualize every day, how you get off this release or run this dig route, if you see the little nuances of playing the position every single day on tape or during practice, it just kind of gets into you, because that’s the expectation level. When it’s your turn, you’re expected to do the same thing. Expectations are very high. Competition is very high.

It just came down to accountability. I’m not saying guys aren’t accountable now, but there was a lot more talent then and the standard was different, in my opinion, as far as what you should do out on the field.

How would you describe what Jeremy Pruitt has done at Tennessee so far?

He had a lot to learn. Anytime you have a first-year head coach in the SEC, it’s going to be a learning experience. I think he took his lumps in the first year, of being that CEO of the football team. I think he’s come a long way. He’s improving as a head coach every single game.

The one thing you want to see with a team is, are guys going out there and competing? Are guys going out there and improving every week? Especially over the last couple weeks, you’ve seen that. It takes time for an entire team to buy in on what you’re promoting and what you’re teaching. That just takes time, man.

And then you throw in talent level, it’s a tough situation for him to come into. But I think he’s building a program. You build it from the inside out, and he knows what that’s supposed to look like, in terms of the trenches, the offensive and defensive line. But recruiting is tough. SEC recruiting is tough. He understands that, but he knows what it looks like and I have full confidence he’s going to get it in the right place. I know Coach Fulmer has confidence in him, too. It just takes time. I know Tennessee fans hate hearing that, because they’ve been hearing that for the last 10-12 years, but it really does take time to build a strong foundation. With the recruiting class of last year, the offensive linemen he recruited and the guys he has committed for the 2020 class, I think it won’t be long before we see Tennessee competing again.

What did you think of the play at the goal line last week?

I think it was really unfortunate. Looking at the diagram of the play — and I was actually at the game with my son — from our angle, it just looked like he bobbled the ball and he was trying to grab it again, but when you go back and look at the film, you see exactly what happened. You see Trey Smith pulling. You see the center and the tackle blocking down. When you see that, there’s either a miscommunication or (Jarrett Guarantano) did something he was not supposed to do.

I don’t know exactly the rationale behind it, but if you run the play that seemed to be called, it was a walk-in touchdown and we’re a score away from tying the game up with six or seven minutes left in the game. So that’s a tough pill to swallow, as far as thinking about what could have happened if he just ran the play that was called, but obviously that didn’t happen.

So I don’t know, it’s a lot of what-ifs in that game, from officiating calls to missed opportunities. But one thing I was proud of in that game is they competed and they didn’t back down. I know Tennessee is not into moral victories or anything, but they gave themselves a chance to win the game in the fourth quarter.

It didn’t happen, but I think these guys got a lot of confidence playing the No. 1 team and playing the way they did.

How would you describe your reaction and the reaction of other former players you’ve talked to how Pruitt handled Jarrett coming off the field?

I didn’t see a big deal. Honestly, this generation and with social media, it’s a different era. You have the hard-stand people who say, “You shouldn’t put your hand on a player, period.”

And I understand that, because you don’t know how the player might react, and in the moment, you don’t know how far you’ll take it. But it’s not like he grabbed his face mask and slung him around. He grabbed it and tugged on his face mask to get eye contact. I don’t have an issue with it. That’s coaching to me. If you’d have seen some of the stuff that some of us back in our day have gone through with coaches, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it’s football, man. This is a tough sport. And it’s played by tough individuals. It was a teaching moment and I know it was a learning moment for Coach Pruitt.

I don’t think, obviously, he should make a habit of putting his hands on players in any form or fashion, but in the heat of the moment, I thought it was warranted and it’s something that’s going to be forgotten about as time goes on.

But it was one of those situations where he got caught up in the moment, it happened, I’m pretty sure that after Coach Pruitt reflected on it, he probably wouldn’t do that again. But I don’t think it was anything malicious. He was just trying to get eye contact with his player, tugged on it a little bit, said what he needed to say and moved on.

How would you describe how this program treats VFLs right now?

I think we’re on good standing. Obviously, there’s been a lot of transition over the last decade. There’s been different regimes and different rules, different protocol. Where the program stands right now, it’s welcoming to anyone and everyone. That makes you feel good as a former player, that you can go to practice, have access, have access to the coaches, and that feels good. I know a ton of guys who are back in Knoxville and they feel the same way.

And the good thing is you have a guy like Tee Martin on the staff that people, former players, whether they played with him or not, they respect. You have Mikki Allen, a VFL who’s on the staff in an administrative role. You have guys we know and that we played with that wore the orange and white and know what it’s all about and what it should look like, as far as the former player relationships with the program. So they’re making strides. I’m good with where the program is as far as former players.

There can always be improvement at any program. No program is perfect when it comes to that, but I’m pretty satisfied where it is.

Why do you think that relationship between the current program and the people who came before is so important?

I think it’s important because the guys who played know what this program should be. With the amount of time players put into the program, you deserve the ability to come back and have access. A lot of guys, we built this program to where it is right now.

You look at me, I’m a 45-year-old man, and you might not think 25 years ago I was right where you are, but I was. And you’ll be in my position one day. There’s so much knowledge that can be passed to current players from former players of, “Hey, I was in your position once, and this is how I handled it.”

Things are a lot different now, but football is football. Relationships are relationships. And I was talking to Mikki Allen last week and he’s in his new role and we were talking about the importance of representing yourself when you’re 18, 19, 20 and developing relationships with people and your staff. That’s something I prided myself on when I was there, that even though it’s been so many years since I’ve played, people remember how you treated them when you were 18 and 19. That’s so important. Some guys get that at an early age. Some guys don’t. Some guys get it late. But those little things, relationship-building, networking. Your last name means something 20-25 years from now. Those little things, I think are important for the young guys over there.

How do you think the Pruitt era ultimately plays out?

That remains to be seen. I think we’re on good footing now. It takes players. And it takes a couple recruiting classes of guys that he actually wants and that fit his scheme and his style of play. I think we’re on good footing as far as that.

But it comes down to players. We have talent in the coaching staff to get guys in the right places and positions and teach technique, being more physical. I think Coach Pruitt is on his way, but it’s still going to take another year or so to get his guys in the program and get it to where he wants his program run.

(Top photo: Getty Images)