Tennessee football: Top 10 out of state Vols for 2019 season

Tennessee football will rely on talent from across the country in Jeremy Pruitt’s second season. Here are the top 10 Volunteers from outside the state.

It remains true that even in its best of times, the core of Tennessee football needs to be built around in-state players. Jackson’s own Al Wilson being the heart of the 1998 national championship team is proof of that.

However, it’s also true that the Vols have always prided themselves as a program on being able to go more national than other schools. After all, Peyton Manning, Leonard Little, Peerless Price and Jamel Lewis were all key figures during that late 1990s run and came from all over.

Jeremy Pruitt is trying to get back to that tradition on Rocky Top, and it’s already showing on the recruiting trail. Georgia was his top state for Tennessee football’s recruiting class in 2019, not the state of Tennessee.

Heading into this year, the Vols will be relying on lots of talent from outside the state to take that next step as a program. Whether or not they have enough from within and outside the state remains to be seen. But what’s clear is they’ll need lots of that out of state talent.

So who are the guys not from the state that really need to step up? In this post, we’re going to find out by ranking all of that talent. And make no mistake, there is plenty of it spread across the team as a whole.

Although Pruitt is the one who has put more focus on talent from outside the state, there are still plenty of national players from the Butch Jones days who are going to be key to this team. Many of them are elite prospects with some of the best potential on the team.

Simply put, if the Vols are successful in any way in 2019, it will be due in large part to out of state talent. Who will those talented players be though? And what impact will they have? Let’s break it down here with the top 10 Tennessee football players from outside the state on the Vols’ roster for the 2019 season.