Tennessee football closed out Jeremy Pruitt’s second spring practice with many lingering issues. Here are five concerning signs for the Volunteers.
Heading into spring practice, signs for Tennessee football were much more encouraging than they were last year. That hasn’t changed heading into Jeremy Pruitt’s second year as head coach of the Vols, and some concerns related to the upcoming 2019 season have actually been lessened.
That’s something to be expected. After all, you have spring practice for a reason. And with a much healthier group than last year along with numerous new recruits who were early enrollees, Pruitt and the coaching staff should have been able to improve some issues. They did just that.
However, there are still many problems facing the program. To be fair, that was to be expected too. Tennessee football is coming off a 5-7 season in which they lost six games by 25 or more points, and they changed coordinators on both sides of the ball this offseason. No lingering concerns with all of those facts would be alleviated with just a month of spring practice.
Anyway, the 15 practices did open our eyes to which concerns are valid, though, and if any new concerns are worth bringing up. As we’ve said for a while, spring ball doesn’t give you a lot, but it allows you to take in a few colonels of information.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the concerns we were able to get from those colonels. This will be another ranking of the biggest ones facing the program heading into the season. We’ll base them off what we saw in the spring game, what coaches said throughout spring practice and what we knew about the program going into the season.
Just to be clear, they’re much smaller in terms of significance than they were last year. It’s also worth noting that there is plenty of time to fix these issues, or at least improve upon them, with more practices and more newcomers arriving in the summer.
So let’s go ahead and break down the issues still facing the Vols heading into the 2019 season and the things they need to work on. These are the five concerning signs for Tennessee football following spring practice.