Tennessee coach Butch Jones is borderline obsessed with his Vols being among the nation’s most innovative college football programs, and now he’s able to study some of his players even while they’re sleeping.

Tennessee football coach Butch Jones

Not in a creepy way, though.

Twenty-five Tennessee players are having their sleep patterns studied throughout preseason camp, Jones said during Friday’s annual media day in Neyland Stadium.

Everything in Jones’ program centers around competition, and the players being studied for sleep habits are no different.

“They actually have a system set up underneath their mattress, and we can gauge how many hours of sleep they have,” Jones said. “They have [an app] on their cell phones, and they actually have goals. They have competitions. They’re set up in groups, and they compete, and it’s changed our kid’s mindsets. They wear glasses to block out the blue light when they go to bed at night. If anyone’s having a hard time sleeping at night and you’re on your phone, it’s usually gonna take an hour longer to go to sleep, so they wear these orange goggles that block out the blue light. The mind tells your body it’s time to go to sleep.

“We’re trying to really educate them and provide them the means to really be able to rest and recover.”

Jones said Tennessee sports nutritionist Allison Maurer has “done a tremendous job of really kind of fostering this and really kind of championing this cause,” and he said the program eventually could expand to include every player on the team.

For now, though, there are just 25 guinea pigs.

“We wanted to see how it went, and they just manpower —Â being able to see how that goes and see the benefits,” Jones said. “We’ll continue to expand that list.”

Tennessee senior defensive end and outside linebacker Chris Weatherd

At least one of Tennessee’s sleeping guinea pigs — senior defensive end and outside linebacker Chris Weatherd —Â said the study has turned him from a skeptic into a believer.

“We’ve turned it into a competition, ‘cause the more you sleep, the better you perform throughout the week,” Weatherd said. “At first I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’ but it is true. It actually helps me out a lot. It helps me every day.”

Weatherd said he slept approximately seven hours per night last year because it was his first year in the Tennessee program, and he was focused on acclimating himself to a new environment on the field and everywhere else on campus.

The versatile speed-rusher said he enthusiastically volunteered for the sleep study but didn’t believe it would prove much.

“Last year I was getting maybe about seven hours of sleep per night,” Weatherd said. “Now I’m getting 9-10 hours or sleep per night. It makes a big difference. The biggest difference is your reaction. Your reaction time is so much better when you get a lot of sleep versus when you don’t.

“I like this program a lot. It’s showed me so much more than I thought it would.”

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