Tennessee football: 10 greatest seasons by Vols who didn’t earn All-American honors

Tennessee football has had numerous individuals put together legendary seasons with no national recognition. Here are those 10 greatest Volunteers showings.

From the days over Robert Neyland all the way through Butch Jones, Tennessee football has a long history of producing All-Americans and NFL talent. Even without any Heisman Trophy winners, the Vols have been recognized numerous times.

However, there have been notable seasons in the past in which they did not get the recognition they deserved. That sometimes comes with rankings and national awards, like Peyton Manning and Johnny Majors finishing second in the Heisman, but it also comes with just no national recognition that is warranted.

Sometimes the NCAA just has a pre-conceived notion of who should be recognized in a certain year, and that affects what happens throughout the season. Like every school at some point, Tennessee football has had players fall victim to that notion.

To be fair, there are some years in which a Vols player will have a legendary performance, but that just happened to be a year that lots of players at that position had such a performance. It was just a shame that sometimes they would not get the recognition they deserved.

In this post, we’re going to look back at some of those years. The players on this list had a specific year that was incredibly memorable but did not achieve any All-American recognition for it. In fact, they never achieved All-American recognition for their careers. By no recognition, we mean that literally no service out there named them All-Americans.

We’ll obviously heavily weigh their stats, but team success, their impact on games and a look at what they were dealing with when it comes to personnel issues are all factors as well. So there are lots of factors.

As you’ll see, there will be some years we can’t blame the NCAA for that. But there are others in which a player got robbed. Finally, there will be years where a player didn’t have the stats for national recognition but still had an amazing single-season performance.

We’ll break down how each one applies on this list. So which Vols did not get the proper recognition for amazing performances? It’s time to begin our countdown and give such players the shoutouts they deserve. These are the 10 greatest single seasons by individual Tennessee football players who did not achieve All-American recognition.