Tennessee football: 5 reasons Vols are fine without top 10 recruiting class

5. Filling needs was the focus of this recruiting class.

We’ve been stressing this throughout our coverage of Tennessee football’s recruiting class over the past week, but it’s something that needs to come up again. The Vols were all about shoring up needs in this 2019 class.

Jeremy Pruitt had a historically bad offensive line in 2018 and then in the offseason lost one player to transfer, another to injury and potentially one more to illness. So on the offensive line front, he loaded up with five players, three four-stars and a five-star.

Meanwhile, he got six defensive backs, three of whom were four-stars, to address the lack of depth at cornerback and the fact that two of the three rotation safeties are gone from last year while the other guy will be gone next year. And he also got two four-star players to fill the inside linebacker void.

Pruitt only came up short at receiver, where he could have used more bodies considering the fact that four receivers are rising seniors on the Vols’ roster. However, with that one big exception, UT addressed almost all of its major concerns.

Even at defensive tackle, Pruitt got the bodies in place. Now, this is the one part where the star rankings come in. Two of the three tackles are junior college transfers and one of those guys is the only four-star of the three. Given all the departing talent there, it definitely could have been better. But there’s no denying he got the bodies.