Tennessee football: 5 reasons Vols were shut out of 2019 NFL Draft

3. Players did not develop properly.

This is a bit of a build off of our previous post, dealing with schematic changes and other issues with X’s and O’s. But one thing Butch Jones clearly did not do was develop players with a few rare exceptions, many of whom were players he didn’t target.

Tennessee football did not see Alexis Johnson make any noise until his senior season under Jeremy Pruitt despite being a four-star defensive tackle. Jonathan Kongbo moved around so much that even before his season-ending injury as a senior, he had not been able to show enough for the NFL Draft.

Micah Abernathy struggled with consistency the whole time, and Kyle Phillips never made a splash until his senior year while Shy Tuttle never stood out in four years. All of these guys proved they have talent, but they never got the chance to significantly showcase it.

Now, Quart’e Sapp actually was one player who did show development and was hurt more by the schematic changes. But he was an exception. Everybody else struggled to move along that much under Jones, and the fact that so many of them broke out under Pruitt is an indictment against what Jones was able to do.

Considering the fact that the Vols could never get much from guys like D.J. Henderson either and the fact that none of the juniors outside of Sapp even got a sniff from NFL scouts this past year, it’s pretty clear that nobody moved along the way they were supposed to. Naturally, that will make it hard to get drafted.