Lucas Panzica discusses how QB Joey Aguilar could be the next Vol to follow along with a widespread trend happening within the Tennessee athletic department
00:00All eyes are on new Tennessee quarterback Joey Aguilar as he is on campus and getting ready to compete for the starting position.
00:07But one big question looms, can Joey Aguilar follow a trend that has brought Tennessee athletics a lot of recent success over the years?
00:15We'll tell you what that is next.
00:20Hey, Lucas Panzeca here from 104.5 The Zone and A to Z Sports.
00:23So we have no idea if Joey Aguilar is going to be Tennessee's starting quarterback.
00:27We know that he comes over from App State and then UCLA, transferring to Tennessee after the messy split between the Vols and Nico Iamaliava.
00:35And we know that he's going to get a chance to compete for the starting job with Jake Merklinger and George McIntyre,
00:40who obviously were brought to Tennessee out of high school by Josh Heupel and his staff and are probably a little bit ahead of Aguilar as far as the offensive install is concerned.
00:50But the former App State and UCLA quarterback does have a chance to follow along on a trend that has been very good.
00:57To Tennessee athletics, and that is high level contribution from transfers and from transfers that are relatively under the radar as far as the national landscape is concerned.
01:09Joey Aguilar is not a player that was at the top of any transfer portal boards.
01:13Joey Aguilar is not a player that most college football fans or media would really know anything about if he wasn't the guy that was coming in to replace Nico Iamaliava after a highly publicized divorce between Nico and the university.
01:26But Joey Aguilar has a chance to do something that the likes of Hendon Hooker did in 2022, that the likes of Dalton Connect did last year or two years ago, I should say, with Tennessee men's basketball.
01:38And that is that under the radar transfer coming in to make a big impact.
01:42Now, first things first, I don't want to put those expectations on Joey Aguilar.
01:46I might have already done that simply by putting those guys' names next to his, right?
01:50Hendon Hooker brought Tennessee football out of the depths.
01:53He led the Vols to that miraculous 10-win season out of nowhere in year two of Josh Heupel beating Alabama and being in the Heisman race, obviously, before tearing his ACL in that game against South Carolina.
02:05And Dalton Connect, as we know, took over as one of the best players in college basketball, taking Tennessee all the way to the Elite Eight, winning SEC Player of the Year, and going on to be a first-round draft pick in the NBA draft.
02:17Those are lofty, lofty goals for Joey Aguilar.
02:20But it is true that Tennessee Athletics, since the transfer portal era really began, has done a nice job utilizing it.
02:27And it's not always the big-time, hyped-up transfers that have come in and made the biggest impacts, right?
02:33Liam Doyle was a highly publicized transfer coming into Tennessee baseball, but as a one-and-done guy, he won SEC Pitcher of the Year.
02:40He was a huge reason why Tennessee made it to Super Regionals for a fifth year in a row under Tony Vitello.
02:47So, all I'm saying is, Joey Aguilar has the table set for him to be the next one to take advantage of that opportunity.
02:55Hendon Hooker was unheralded coming from Virginia Tech.
02:58Dalton Connect was completely unknown coming from Northern Colorado.
03:02And Joey Aguilar is a guy that was at Appalachian State and UCLA, but certainly nobody was looking at him as the type of guy to lead an SEC program even just a few months ago.
03:12Now, he has an opportunity to do that if he wins this job, and he has an opportunity if he has a massive year out of nowhere for Tennessee in 2025
03:20to join a rarefied air when it comes to some of the greats that have recently come through the University of Tennessee.
