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Tennessee football: Vols 5 deepest NFL Draft years following losing seasons

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: Mychal Rivera #81 of the Tennessee Volunteers against the Florida Gators at Neyland Stadium on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - SEPTEMBER 15: Mychal Rivera #81 of the Tennessee Volunteers against the Florida Gators at Neyland Stadium on September 15, 2012 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images /

The 2019 NFL Draft comes off a Tennessee football losing season. Here are five times that happened but numerous Volunteers were still selected.

Expectations for Tennessee football in the 2019 NFL Draft are low. That’s not surprising. The Vols are coming off their second straight losing season under three different head coaches, so the talent is clearly not there.

Jeremy Pruitt figures to see his program make a bigger impact in future years, but the results on the field did not translate to NFL Draft picks. That much is beyond clear to anybody who watched the Vols last year, a team that lost six of their seven games by 25 or more points. And they did that a year after going 4-8 and finishing last in the SEC, their worst year in history.

Simply put, Tennessee football hasn’t done anything to warrant a lot of players being taken in the 2019 NFL Draft. Part of that is the plethora of returning young talent they have and the limited key departures they suffered, even if they were all at one position.

But, surprisingly, this has not always been the case. After all, this isn’t the first NFL Draft coming on the heels of a losing season for the Vols. In fact, when you look at this century and in particular this decade, it’s far from such a thing.

In the past, the Vols have had some losing seasons that followed up with lots of guys going in the NFL Draft. Sure, it’s a paradox, but even in down years, UT puts out talent. We’re going to take a look at some of those teams in this post.

This will actually be a ranking of the most successful NFL Drafts for the Vols following losing seasons. Our criteria of success includes both how high somebody was taken and how many draft picks there were. But since it analyzes the NFL Draft alone, we’re not going to break down the NFL careers of those drafted. It’s irrelevant here.

But hey, for Kyle Phillips, Alexis Johnson, Shy Tuttle and others, this is something worth looking into for encouragement. So let’s break it down here. These are the five most successful NFL Drafts for Tennessee football coming off a losing season.

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