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Tennessee football 2019 season recap: Vols report card for year

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 12: Tim Jordan #9 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates with Brandon Kennedy #55 and Jerrod Means #14 after rushing for a fifteen yard touchdown during the first half of a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 12, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TN - OCTOBER 12: Tim Jordan #9 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates with Brandon Kennedy #55 and Jerrod Means #14 after rushing for a fifteen yard touchdown during the first half of a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Neyland Stadium on October 12, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images /

There was a wide range of performances in Tennessee football’s roller coaster 2019 season. Here are our grades for the Volunteers’ entire year.

How do you give out the grades on this one? For the first part of the season, Tennessee football had failing grades across the board. That’s what comes with an 0-2 start when you lose both games at home to Group of Five schools and have everybody ready to turn on your program and your head coach.

However, such a strong finish is naturally going to do the opposite and result in aces across the board. After all, you can’t overstate six straight wins to close out the season, including a two-touchdown comeback with five minutes left to win the Gator Bowl.

Given what Jeremy Pruitt inherited, an 8-5 finish was a huge accomplishment for Tennessee football. Nine to 10 wins was a possibility at the beginning of the season given the schedule, but eight wins did show substantial improvement.

So as we get set to dish out our final report card for all the position groups, it’s worth noting that there were more positives than negatives. However, it’s also worth noting that we have to take the negatives into account.

In addition to taking those things into account, we will be looking at how everybody at a certain position played for those position grades. At times, some players were benched, their backups performed even worse, and then they came back in and improved dramatically. Given the struggles at some areas by guys who saw action, that makes things a big trickier to grade.

All of this is tricky, to be fair. But we have to break down how different units performed. As we did all season long, we’ll separate our report cards into offense, defense, special teams and coaching, and we’ll grade the different positions in each of those units. This is our Tennessee football report card for the Vols’ entire 2019 season.

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