Tennessee football: Vols still overachieved at 5-7 in Jeremy Pruitt’s first season

Tennessee football’s 5-7 record may have been a disappointment in Jeremy Pruitt’s first season as head coach. But the Volunteers still overachieved.

Here’s a stat you may not have thought about. Tennessee football was the underdog in every SEC game it played this year. The Vols were underdogs in nine of 12 games they played. So Vegas, on a week to week basis, had them going 3-9. That should give you an idea of how much Butch Jones destroyed the program.

Instead, thanks to upsets over the Auburn Tigers and Kentucky Wildcats, the Vols managed to go 5-7 Jeremy Pruitt’s first season. Now, that’s not ideal. But it’s safe to say Pruitt overachieved given that fact.

Given the way Tennessee football shocked the Kentucky Wildcats with a 24-7 win to get to 5-5 in November, it had to be extremely disheartening for Vols fans to see their team miss a bowl game again. And to do it by losing their final two games in blowout fashion, both of which were winnable only made it worse.

The fact that six of the seven losses were by 25 or more points and one was a third straight to the Vanderbilt Commodores only made it worse. And it’s only more embarrassing that it was a sixth losing season in nine seasons this decade, including a seventh regular season in which the Vols failed to finish above .500.

But despite all of those negatives, and there are a lot of them, Tennessee football still overachieved this year. Considering everything working against them, Jeremy Pruitt worked a minor miracle by having the Vols in contention just to get to a bowl game at the end of the season.

Consider, for a second, what he inherited. Pruitt took over the worst team in school history, one that lost eight games and went winless in the SEC for the first time ever. Then he came into a disastrous situation considering the weeklong embarrassment of John Currie on the coaching search that was sparked by the failed attempt to hire Greg Schiano.

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Pruitt comes in and installs a 3-4 defense and a pro-style offense. But due to a litany of injuries in 2016 and 2017, he has hardly anything to work with in spring ball. So there were no competitive practices then, and they hardly got competitive through fall camp.

Those things were bad enough for Tennessee football heading into the 2018 season. Then there’s the season itself. By some measures, the Vols played the toughest schedule in the nation. After all, every SEC team they played made a bowl game.

On top of that, five of their 12 opponents are currently in the Top 25, and four are in the Top 15 with two in the Top 5. This is what a first-year coach has to navigate through despite a team learning a new system on both sides of the ball that basically missed all of spring practice.

Considering all of that, it’s no surprise that the Vols were underdogs in nine games this year. Pruitt was working with very little through a very brutal schedule. This is not the same type of program that Nick Saban, Kirby Smart or even Dan Mullen this year had to deal with.

Going forward, you have to assume a healthier team with more depth will be better equipped to navigate an SEC schedule. As bad as 5-7 again is for the Vols, you have to remember that a bowl game was always going to be considered a miracle for this team at the start of this season. Sure, making it would’ve been big for the program. But even without it, Pruitt still overachieved.