Tennessee football firing defensive coordinator after disappointing season

Recently, the Tennessee football program’s disappointing 2025 regular season came to an end with a loss against Vanderbilt at home in blowout fashion over rivalry weekend. Tennessee will now face off against Illinois in the Liberty Mutual Music City Bowl on December 30, after which head coach Josh Heupel will try to sift through the rubble of this season and figure out what went wrong.

On Monday, Tennessee made a big move in its coaching staff.

“Tennessee and defensive coordinator Tim Banks are expected to part ways,” reported Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports on X, formerly Twitter. “…Banks was a finalist for the Broyles Award last year.”

The Tennessee defense did take a pretty sizable step back this year, with the team relinquishing huge scoring outputs against Georgia, Vanderbilt, and other schools during the SEC slate of their schedule.

The Volunteers will now have to go back to the drawing board, and it will be interesting to see how much influence Heupel has on who the school hires to be their next defensive coordinator.

Meanwhile, Heuepel himself could potentially find himself on the hot seat if the Volunteers were to turn in another subpar season in 2026. This season, Tennessee football finished the season at 9-3, which isn’t bad but not where they wanted to be. It wasn’t too long ago that Tennessee was briefly the number one team in the country, with Hendon Hooker at quarterback, for a small stretch of the 2022 season, but just about everything has gone downhill for the program since that moment.

In any case, Tennessee and Illinois will face off in the Music City Bowl on December 30.

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