Tennessee football: 5 key position battles for Vols 2019 spring practice

Tennessee football returns a ton of players from 2018, but the Volunteers still have many open starting spots. Here are key position battles for the spring.

After a 5-7 season in 2018, Tennessee football is gearing up for the spring again. As Jeremy Pruitt enters his second year, he’ll obviously be looking to upgrade numerous positions to make sure he never has another losing record.

That makes spring practice this year a huge deal. Sure, the bulk of his 2018 recruiting class won’t arrive until the summer, including the Vols’ top prospect, Darnell Wright. But they still have a lot of work to do until then.

As Tennessee football gets set for this spring practice, the number of returning starters would seem to indicate that there are few open positions. But that’s completely the opposite. After all, you don’t want to keep the same starters from a 5-7 team.

Sure, some will have more experience. But overall, 5-7 spells upgrade, especially with six of those losses coming by 25 or more points. As a result, numerous positions are likely going to be open for a fight in the spring.

Some will inevitably be open due to the departing talent, but others will be open due to a bigger need for production at that specific position. In this post, we’re going to take a look at those position battles that have arisen or could arise in the spring.

With two new coordinators and five positions overall under new leadership, nobody should be safe. There are a few spots where you can reasonably expect starters to hold their positions, but the vast majority could be up for grabs.

As we rank them here, our criteria includes how safe or unsafe the current starter at a position is, if there is any, and how wide open the position is. Also, since it’s spring ball, we have to also look at how full the position will be with all of its potential starters, as some of the guys who could steal the job won’t arrive until the summer.

Taking that all into account, we still have quite a few reasonable races to keep an eye on. So let’s break them down here. Here are the key five position battles for Tennessee football heading into spring practice 2019.