Tennessee football: 10 Vols with injury concerns for 2019

As Jeremy Pruitt continues to rebuild Tennessee football, key players being injury prone can set that back. Here are 10 Volunteers who have such issues.

Just this week, Tennessee football suffered a major blow with news that Darrin Kirkland Jr. and James Brown are retiring. Brown never saw any official game action, but Kirkland was a key inside linebacker, especially through the Vols’ transition to a 3-4 defense last year under Jeremy Pruitt.

That’s the nature of injuries in this sport, however. UT fans know that more than anybody after how the last few years have gone. After all, the final two years of Butch Jones’s tenure were ones marked nothing but injuries.

However, these guys join other Vols to give up football this offseason due to injury. Another key loss in that regard is Chance Hall, who was a starter as a freshman in 2015, similar to Kirkland, but could never stay healthy. Three more players, Tanner Antonutti, Devante Brooks, and Eric Crosby, have all retired due to health issues as well.

So what are things looking like for Tennessee football on the injury front this year? Well, it’s still a work in progress. The Vols were much healthier last year than the previous two, but lingering issues still affect the program there.

Pruitt will have to deal with that throughout 2019. But where will that be the biggest issue on Rocky Top? In this post, we’re going to look at how by analyzing the key players who pose the biggest injury risk.

Our criteria for selecting these players include the number of injuries they have suffered, the recency of their injuries, how severe their injuries have been, and of course, how crucial they are to the program. All of these things determine where the biggest injury risks are.

Some players have already shown offseason injury issues. But worst-case scenario is all of these guys suffer something, which will wreck the program. So who specifically are we talking about? Let’s take a look here. These are the 10 Tennessee football players who bring the biggest injury concerns to the Vols in 2019.