Tennessee football: Five needs for Vols to address in 2021 recruiting class

As Jeremy Pruitt looks toward the 2020 season now, 2021 recruiting is underway for Tennessee football. Here are the five key needs for the Volunteers.

All of a sudden, Tennessee football has a stacked roster heading into 2020. Jeremy Pruitt has done an amazing job rebuilding the program up from scratch, and as a result, the Vols should have the depth on paper to compete with the top teams this year.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they are better than those top teams, and on paper doesn’t always translate to on the field. But with a top 10 2020 class, the arrival of multiple transfers and the return of key players, Pruitt has enough to compete.

Now the challenge becomes whether or not he can keep replenishing that depth. After all, Tennessee football had restocked its roster in Derek Dooley’s third year on the job as well, but a disastrous 2012 season set things back a couple of years and left the cupboard empty until the 2015 season came along.

Butch Jones, meanwhile, restocked it for 2015 and 2016, but a disappointing finish in 2016 and then a collapse in 2017 is what left Pruitt with nothing to begin with. This is how quickly a stacked roster can fall apart.

Assuming Pruitt is actually able to produce results with his roster, he now has to focus on keeping a necessary amount of depth everywhere on a yearly basis. For the Vols’ 2021 recruiting class, that means focusing on specific areas.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at those key areas of need for Rocky Top. UT has already secured a few commitments for its 2021 class, but those are never guaranteed. As a result, we’re going to be looking at these areas assuming there are no commitments at the moment.

Here, we are simply going to focus on where Pruitt clearly needs to make sure he rebuilds his roster. He will have to do it again, and doing that is as tough as, if not tougher than, rebuilding it up in the first place.

So let’s go ahead and look at where he needs to put his focus to make sure this team doesn’t lose a step after rebuilding itself back up. These are the five key areas of need for Tennessee football’s 2021 recruiting class.