Spring football roundups: Can the Veer and Shoot reach a new rocky top?

Josh Heupel's brand of the Veer and Shoot offense combined with Tennessee's resources is creating new possibilities for the program and the scheme.

There’s been a significant market inefficiency in college football for a while in various college programs’ inability to make the most of a particular sort of football player.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the player type is the large, powerful, athletic, and black quarterback from a poorer community who may or may not have received a ton of high level instruction in throwing mechanics and almost definitely didn’t get a lot of reps in an advanced passing game in high school.

The latter, as I’ve noted many times, is a massive factor. Much of playing high level quarterback is comparable to being a chess master. You need to develop the vision to quickly process all the moving parts on the field, which requires seeing it over and over and over again.

How many times have you seen a large, cannon-armed, and athletic young black quarterback draw rave reviews out of high school for his raw abilities only for him to flame out trying to execute a college passing game?

I can think of a couple of examples pretty easily. Like Hendon Hooker, who’s stats and performance at Virginia Tech weren’t awful, but he was clearly encouraged to seek playing time elsewhere. Or Joe Milton, who struggled badly at Michigan and eventually lost his job to Cade McNamara (his polar opposite) while Jim Harbaugh recruited over both of them with J.J. McCarthy.

Under Josh Heupel’s Veer and Shoot offense, Tennessee has shown the ability to maximize both players.

Hooker is 6-foot-3, 217 pounds and threw for 3,135 yards and 27 touchdowns in 2022 while running for 430 yards and five more scores despite missing the final few games with injury. Milton is 6-foot-5, 244 pounds and after taking over for the bowl game against Clemson he threw for 251 yards at 8.96 ypa with a trio of touchdown passes in a commanding win.

Tennessee now has a 5-star, big, cannon-armed passer lined up behind Milton in Nico Iamaleava, who actually has a few years of more passing-intensive years in high school to bank on. You can bet on the Vols not failing to maximize either Milton or Iamaleava though. In fact they’re likely to snatch up other talented athletes in the future who might have had less success in other programs.

Why? It’s because of how the Veer and Shoot offensive works to make football simpler on offense. What we may see in the coming years though is how this system’s unique approach may have some unexplored upside when executed with a higher caliber of athlete at a program like Tennessee.