Tennessee has done an excellent job recruiting quarterbacks since Josh Heupel made it to campus. Heupel has landed four quarterbacks including Nico Iamaleava, Jake Merklinger, George MacIntyre, and Faizon Brandon. It’s safe to say they locate their targets early on and have done just that in the 2027 class.

Trae Taylor is a Lake In The Hills, Illinois prospect who attends Carmel Catholic High School. Taylor is a four-star target who recently received his Tennessee offer and offers from 20+ schools as a current sophomore in high school. Many anticipate him to be a five-star.

He caught up with Tennessee on SI following his offer.

“It is a special offer to me. Tennessee was one of the first schools my dad took me to when I was younger. This helped me to dream about playing in front of over 100k fans one day,” the 2027 QB states. “It was Coach Halzle and Coach Militello who offered me. They just said they watched my film and loved it. They think I’d be a great fit for them with the things I do. (Which I do agree with). Tennessee, once they started recruiting me has been very consistent,” Taylor stated.

He will visit Rocky Top sooner than later and is working on finding a date soon. “I’m most definitely going to visit.  We are trying to figure out a good date to make this happen. But I’m definitely getting down there this season.” Tennessee is already making noise being listed in Taylor’s early edition of a top 10 that has not been finalized. “Tennessee right now is in my top 10.  As a QB who wouldn’t want to play in an offense where you know they throw it around?  Play in an amazing stadium, and home of Peyton Manning. The fan base has already shown a ton of love on social media. I have already seen the facilities multiple times so I know what that is.”

Moving forward the prospect hopes to connect well with this staff. “I want to see if we connect and if they can develop me to be a 1st round draft pick. Now that I have the offer I’ll make sure to reach out to Joe Milton and get his feedback on things.”

“My biggest message is if this is the school I pick, just know I give my all to be great. That will not change at Tennessee. So keep showing that Tennessee love and I’ll see you soon.”

He also had a story to share about Coach Joey Halzle.

“Just know the first time Coach Halzle saw me throw I was in 6th or 7th grade and I had a great conversation with him and the rest of the staff.  Been a long time coming.  Coach still has not followed me on Twitter like he said years ago,” Taylor said jokingly…”But this offer makes up for that.”

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What head coach Josh Heupel said during his weekly press conference on Monday, looking back at the 19-14 loss at Arkansas and previewing No. 8 Tennessee’s game against Florida on Saturday night (7 Eastern Time, ESPN) at Neyland Stadium:

Opening Statement

“Hope everybody’s doing great. The morning got a good start with the guys. Obviously it’s an opportunity and time of the week where you look back at the football game and how we get better. Whether you win or lose, it’s important by the time you go out on the field with the guys that you flush it, you move on. And as competitors you’re only as good as your next one. Everybody in the building disappointed with the outcome on Saturday night.  You can’t do anything about that at this point other than take the lessons and push forward and continue to, to grow as a football team. And you know, so in that way, no matter what happened the previous week, you got to move on. Guys we’re good. Took the information and had a good demeanor out on the practice field. So it’s important for us that we get off to a good start and prepare the right way, just like it is every single week for us. 

“This week, coming back home. Excited to be back in Neyland Stadium and it’s been been a month since we got a chance to be in there, play in there and see our fans. So looking forward to seeing them. We need to  create a great environment. I know we will, like always. We need to have the Neyland effect in effect on Saturday night. And it’s our responsibility as football team to prepare and practice the right way to go play. But our fans can be a huge part of the environment and the football game as well. 

“So looking forward to it. Florida is playing its best ball right now. They continue to get better throughout the course of the season. That’s really in all three phases. Defensively, long, athletic, have speed Offensively, both the quarterbacks are playing really good football right now. And the offensive line is really solid.”

Tennessee’s offense not establishing tempo the last two games 

“This past week, offensively, you look at the football game, so many self-inflicted wounds. Pre-snap penalties, playing penalties, miscommunication. So at times you’re not playing on tempo. In the course of drives when we’ve wanted to play with tempo, we’ve been able to do it and play it efficiently. D-Samp’s big run, there’s multiple instances of it. At the end of the day you got to play smart, effective football. The prior week (at Oklahoma) I certainly slowed things down in the second half and played a different style just because of the flow of the football game. And I tried to play all three phases together. For us, we got to do the ordinary things at a really high level. Last week we didn’t do that very well. The week before that we did a lot of things really well.” 

Pass protection issues, if they were pre or post snap and Arkansas’ odd front

“Structurally, that is what the last couple opponents have decided to play against us. Certainly capable last week of attacking and performing better than we did in the run game and in the pass game. Again, some of the things that we control, not taking anything away from Arkansas, but some of the things that we control, we did not handle very well. You heard me say it already, but communication was a big part of it and then the penalties just changes the way the game is played. Too many third-and-longs so you got to be ready to go attack what we see on game day.”

If defenses are disguising things to make it harder on Nico Iamaleava

“Nico played really well a week ago (Oklahoma). Clean in his decision making, decisive, accurate with the football. This past week, first play of the ball game, rips a nice ball. Sum of all parts. As the game went on, we didn’t play as clean. Some of that’s Nico. Some of that’s the guys around him. At the quarterback position, takes 10 guys around you playing at a high level too. So sum of all parts, all 11 operating, doing— I’m going to say ordinary things that are really high level, consistently is the difference in the ball game.”

If he thinks teams will continue to do that

“Yeah. The last couple of years we’ve seen four down (fronts), five down, three down, seeing those structures. We got to go attack it and play well.:

The play of Lance Heard and John Campbell, where they need to be better

“We love those guys, believe in those guys. Those two, like pretty much everybody offensively, can perform at a higher level as we go. And have performed at a higher level than they did the other night and some of that’s just ordinary things— fundamentals, technique, alignment, assignment and technique.”

If offensive line issues were communication or losing one-on-one

“Some of it’s just one-on-one battles.”

If he should have taken a timeout after the deep pass to Dont’e Thornton on two-minute drive

“In hindsight, yep, for sure. As I recognized that we weren’t immediately ready thought about going to timeout then I thought we were ready to get the ball off in the next couple seconds and every time out at the end of the game creates a different scenario where you’re not pushing the ball into the end zone, forced to push the ball into the end zone. So yeah, absolutely.”

The challenges of preparing for two Florida quarterbacks in Graham Mertz and DJ Lagway

“Yeah, I think both of ’em have played smart football, they’ve been accurate with the football in particular the last couple of weeks. They both operate within the system extremely well. Both have the ability to run the football and move and extend and make plays. You know, young kid (Lagway) is dynamic with the ball in his hands.

Florida’s defensive front

“Yeah, they’re multiple in what they do. That’s their front. Suits their coverages on the back end. It’s the pressures that they apply and they can get to the quarterback with just a four-down front, too. So, you know, for us, communication, understanding where we’re working to, recognizing the pressure. That can be the front five guys, it’s your back, it’s your tight end at times as well. All gotta be in sync and then you gotta play good football. You gotta play the fundamentals and in technique and win your one on one. But another part of that is going and winning on the outside. Doing it quickly and quarterback being decisive. All 11 guys gotta play together.”

How he thought the team’s preparation was going into the Arkansas game

“I thought Tuesday’s practice during the bye week was really good. Wednesday’s was a different type of practice. I thought our preparation was solid last week. End of the day we didn’t go perform the way we needed to and so that’s personal accountability and team accountability.” 

If there’s an update on Squirrel White, Bru McCoy or Bryson Eason

“None of the injuries are long-term, season-ending injuries. As we go through the week, we’ll find out exactly where everybody’s at. You guys can look forward to the injury report on Wednesday.”

When Kriston Hicks first got an alert of a flash flood emergency at 9:20 a.m. Sept. 27, the home she shared with her 78-year-old grandfather in Hampton, Tennessee, was already doomed.

“I was wading through water to get my disabled grandfather into the van to leave because I had decided on my own that we needed to evacuate,” Hicks told Knox News in a text Oct. 3, the day after her home was demolished. “No one came to tell me. There is no siren in Hampton.”

The Doe River watershed in Carter County was one of several in East Tennessee that swelled to historic levels as remnants of Hurricane Helene drenched the southern Appalachian mountains in what the National Weather Service said was a once-in-a-millennium rainfall event.

In the National Weather Service office in Morristown, which covers East Tennessee, meteorologists were coordinating with local emergency management officials in several counties to issue warnings.

So, why did the warnings seem to come too late for many people across the region?

The answer lies partly in how the National Weather Service issues flash flood warnings, with emergencies and wireless text alerts reserved for “imminent or ongoing” severe flooding, said Morristown meteorologist Brandon Wasilewski.

Three levels to flash flood warnings in East Tennessee

People reading NWS updates on social media in the days leading up to the generational flood, which claimed at least 12 lives in Tennessee, got a sense of the danger ahead.

By Sept. 25, the NWS office in Morristown was already warning of “extreme risk of life-threatening flooding” along the Tennessee-North Carolina border as Helene moved through. At that point, the office had issued only a flood watch.

Residents in border counties did not get a wireless alert of emergency flash flooding until mid-morning on Sept. 27, when the flooding was already underway.

The National Weather Service needs to have confirmation of life-threatening flooding and “catastrophic damages occurring or imminent” before sending out a rare flash flood emergency, Wasilewski told Knox News.

Text alerts go out once the office adds a “considerable” or “catastrophic” tag to the flood warning, triggered by reports that “flash flooding capable of unusual severity of impact is imminent or ongoing,” Wasilewski said.

One trigger for the highest “catastrophic” tag is that multiple water rescues have occurred. The service relies on local emergency managers to handle evacuation orders.

“We always want to try to be proactive,” Wasilewski said. “We’re the ones that send it out, but we want to make sure that it’s risen to that level.”

While the National Weather Service issues flood warnings for specific rivers, it does not have a mechanism to alert specific communities at special risk of flooding. That’s something the service would like to add in the future, Wasilewski said.

“We don’t have the capability at this time specifically, and that’s why we do rely on more of the local officials,” Wasilewski said. “Whenever we do have an event of this magnitude, this is something that we always try to review and try to learn from.”

The week before the storm was already a strange one for weather in East Tennessee. On Sept. 24, East Tennessee recorded its first ever September tornado, an EF-1 twister in Hancock County with 110 mph winds.

The region also got 2-4 inches of rain before Helene even arrived as a tropical storm, which saturated the ground and caused fiercer runoff later on.

Some residents didn’t make much of flood warnings

Three rivers in particular carried a surge of floodwater from western North Carolina to East Tennessee – the French Broad, Nolichucky and Pigeon rivers. The hard-hit town of Erwin sits on the Nolichucky in Unicoi County.

Zully Manzanares, a Head Start program coordinator in Erwin, saw the flash flood warnings that began the night of Sept. 26 but didn’t realize the danger.

“We’ve gotten them before, but I don’t think the alerts were enough to make us realize like that it was going to be to the extent that it was,” Manzanares told Knox News. “The alerts were coming, but I don’t think that they were to the extreme that they needed to be so that people would have taken it more seriously.”

Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email daniel.dassow@knoxnews.com.

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