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Tennessee football: 5 most underrated players in Vols 2019 recruiting class

By Caleb Calhoun

30 Oct 1999: The band leader of the Tennessee Volunteers marches on the field at halftime during the game against the South Carolina Gamecocks at the Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Volunteers defeated the Gamecocks 30-7. Mandatory Credit: Jonathan Daniel /Allsport
30 Oct 1999: The band leader of the Tennessee Volunteers marches on the field at halftime during the game against the South Carolina Gamecocks at the Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Volunteers defeated the Gamecocks 30-7. Mandatory Credit: Jonathan Daniel /Allsport /
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Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images
Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images /

Recruiting always brings hidden gems, and the same is true for Tennessee football. Here are five steals in the Volunteers’ 2019 class.

This past Tennessee football recruiting class was the best for the Vols in four years. Jeremy Pruitt secured the first five-star since 2016 and first five-star freshman since 2015, and it was the first top 12 class since 2015 as well.

Nonetheless, UT still didn’t have a top 10 or even top 5 class, and they were only in the middle of the pack in the SEC. For a while, now, we’ve gone into detail about how the focus on the trail was about emphasizing needs.

But for Pruitt and his staff to see success come from this class, they need to have found a few steals from their new signees. After all, you can’t win a national championship, or even compete in the SEC, if your class is in the middle of the pack of the conference.

The class needs to be better than it looks on paper. Tennessee football has a history of top classes horribly flaming out and less heralded classes become great success, and this one is somewhere in the middle, so that’s good news.

Still, whether or not this class overachieves comes down to how many steals Pruitt found. In this post, we’re going to take a look at those underrated players who made the class look even worse than it probably should.

These players could be underrated for any number of reasons. But all of the players on this list either had raw athleticism that we couldn’t ignore or an extenuating circumstance that dropped their rating, enough for us to believe they’re better than that star count.

Pruitt had to obviously be much more careful with this class since his rebuilding project did not start in the same decent shape that Nick Saban’s did with the Alabama Crimson Tide or that Kirby Smart’s did with the Georgia Bulldogs. He had to go to work a lot harder to find specific players who could shock the world.

So how well did he do? Which players could turn out to be major steals for the Vols? Take a look at those prospects we named here. These are the five most underrated signees from Tennessee football’s 2019 recruiting class.

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