Going from 5-7 to 8-5 means Tennessee football improved in a lot of areas Jeremy Pruitt’s second year. Here are the Volunteers’ biggest leaps.
We all know about the story of Tennessee football orchestrating a dramatic turnaround during the 2019 season. A team that started off 0-2 with two losses at home to Group of Five schools and then fell to 1-4 and eventually 2-5 before winning five straight to finish 8-5 is naturally going to have lots of improvements that happen over the course of the year.
But for that turnaround to even be possible, there had to be quite a few improvements in the abstract from 2018 to 2019. After all, they couldn’t have had what it took to turn things around like that if offseason improvements weren’t made.
That was just the case as well. Even before things turned around, there were clear parts of Rocky Top that had gotten better from the previous year, and Tennessee football’s dramatic improvement in quite a few critical areas had everything to do with Pruitt having a positive second season that ended with a Gator Bowl victory over the Indiana Hoosiers.
In this post, we’re going to rank those biggest improvements the Vols made from one season to the next. Again, this is a look at where they got better in the abstract, not how they improved over the course of the 2019 season specifically.
Some of these improvements were predictable because of the personnel changes Pruitt was making. Others, however, were indeed up in the air, and we didn’t know what would be the case until the season took shape.
Improvements could involve position units, individual players or aspects on the field. All of them were key to the Vols proving that they are trending in an upward direction after two years under the leadership of Pruitt.
Where did UT improve to show that? How substantial was that improvement? Let’s break that down here. These are the five biggest improvements Tennessee football made from the 2018 season to the 2019 season.