Steve Spurrier tabs Tennessee's Josh Heupel, South Carolina's Shane Beamer as first-year coaches of the year

Tennessee's Josh Heupel did as good of a job as any first-year coach in college football, and Steve Spurrier acknowledged that.

Heupel and South Carolina's Shane Beamer were named co-recipients of the Steve Spurrier Award, given annually to the nation's best first-year coach, the Football Writers Association of America announced.

Spurrier presented the award to Heupel and Beamer during a Zoom press conference on Monday night.

UT is Spurrier's former rival when he coached at Florida. And South Carolina is his former employer, where he coached after the Gators.

"I always believed a coach doesn't need four or five years to get his players in there and build his system," Spurrier said. "There are a lot of excuse words that coaches like to use. But all of our candidates didn't use any excuse words.

"I think South Carolina was picked 13 out of 14 (teams in SEC preseason polls). And Tennessee was 12th. They were right there with Vanderbilt at the bottom of the SEC."

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Heupel is the first two-time winner of the award, which existed for the past 20 years but took Spurrier's name this year. Heupel won it at UCF in 2018.

Under Heupel, UT went 7-6 with an overtime loss to Purdue in the Music City Bowl while ranking No. 7 in scoring offense (39.3 ppg) and No. 9 in total offense (474.9 ypg) in FBS.

The Vols scored 511 points, the most in a single season in program history.

It was quite a turnaround considering what Heupel inherited. UT went 3-7 in 2020, which ended with coach Jeremy Pruitt's firing over alleged NCAA recruiting violations.

"Because of what had transpired in the previous year, (UT players) were absolutely open to listening to what we think needed to change to be successful," Heupel said. "They were very open to that. You just had to constantly show them what that looks like as you implemented it."

The Vols underwent a mass exodus of players transferring, but Heupel salvaged the roster en route to a 4-4 SEC record, including a 45-20 win over Beamer's South Carolina team. The Gamecocks went 7-6 and 3-5 in SEC play.

Reach Adam Sparks at adam.sparks@knoxnews.com and on Twitter @AdamSparks.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Tennessee's Josh Heupel, South Carolina's Shane Beamer win Steve Spurrier award