Tennessee football has had some very talented teams underachieve in the past. Here are the top 5 Volunteers squads to miss a postseason appearance.
Not too many people held Jeremy Pruitt accountable for Tennessee football missing out on a bowl game last year. After all, it was his first season on the job, and injuries, his schematic changes and Butch Jones leaving the cupboard bare limited what the Vols could do.
However, in the past, there have been other teams in UT history to miss out on bowl games that had no excuse to do so. These squads dramatically underachieved for whatever reason and frustrated fans.
Tennessee football a notable history of loading up the pros with talent, and they have had NFL prospects all over the field in even some of the years they didn’t qualify for postseason play. In those instances, you can put blame on coaching.
At least something had to be at work for that to happen. In this post, we’re going to look at what it was by analyzing those incredibly talented teams to miss out on bowl games. By the way, in order to make this list, it has to be after 1970 or the Vols have to have suffered a losing season since bowl eligibility began.
After all, there are plenty of years in which only a few bowls existed. So to make this list, UT will have to have reasonably not qualified for a bowl in any era with its season. We’ll also take into account the level of NFL talent and how experienced that talent was. If there was a ton of talent buried in the depth chart, we’ll obviously drop the team of the list.
With all those factors, you’ll look at these teams and wonder not only how they missed a bowl game but how they didn’t compete for an SEC Championship. And in a few cases, administrators felt the same way, so it resulted in the firing of either a head coach or an assistant coach.
So let’s go ahead and take a look at some bad years on Rocky Top loaded with elite players. Pruitt is tasked with not allowing seasons like this to happen. These are the five most talented Tennessee football teams to miss out on a bowl game.