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Tennessee football: Five areas Vols improved as 2019 season progressed

By Caleb Calhoun

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - NOVEMBER 30: Jarrett Guarantano #2 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates with Eric Gray #3 of the Tennessee Volunteers after scoring a touchdown against the Vanderbilt Commodores during the first quarter at Neyland Stadium on November 30, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images)
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE - NOVEMBER 30: Jarrett Guarantano #2 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates with Eric Gray #3 of the Tennessee Volunteers after scoring a touchdown against the Vanderbilt Commodores during the first quarter at Neyland Stadium on November 30, 2019 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo by Silas Walker/Getty Images) /
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After a 1-4 start, Tennessee football had many areas of improvement to turn things around. Here are the top five ways the Volunteers stepped up their game.

It’s pretty obvious that any team starting 0-2 with back to back home losses to Group of Five schools only to finish 8-5 and with a winning record in the SEC had lots of improvement. In the case of Tennessee football, the increased level of play was blatant in so many ways.

The Vols pretty much improved across the board as the season went on, and that’s a big testament to Jeremy Pruitt in his second year on the job. He made sure his players kept their focus despite the rough start, and midway through the season, it finally began to pay off. That’s how UT was able to finish on a six-game winning streak.

Now, there are a couple of areas that were solid from the start. Kids in those units deserve credit for making the rest of the team catch up to them. But by and large, Tennessee football had major improvements everywhere you could think of.

In this post, we’re going to rank the biggest areas of improvement that Rocky Top enjoyed as the 2019 season progressed. This won’t focus on improvements they made over the 2018 season, when they went 5-7.

Instead, we are looking at areas that were dramatically better at the end of 2019 than they were at the beginning of 2019. Now, in some cases, players returning to health and just gaining more experience was a huge part of this.

However, there were plenty of other instances in which certain players just got better over time, and some of them were even upperclassmen. In fact, one of the most notable players to improve is a veteran on the team.

Anyway, let’s go ahead and break down the units most responsible for the dramatic change in the Vols’ season. These are the five areas in which Tennessee football showed the biggest improvement from the beginning of its season to the end.

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