Tennessee football: Ranking all Vols staff changes during 2020 offseason

With three new hires, one move and one promotion, Tennessee football had five staff changes this offseason. Here is how those moves rank for the Volunteers.

As we have been covering over the past few weeks, Tennessee football has undergone a dramatic series of staff changes for the second straight offseason under Jeremy Pruitt. The Vols lost numerous key staff members to other schools and the pros, and that left multiple openings for Pruitt to bring in new guys.

He made his completed new staff official last Friday. Now, the only holdovers he has from his original staff in 2018 are Chris Weinke, Will Friend and Brian Niedermeyr, and Friend is the only one serving in the same role as offensive line coach.

This offseason, Tennessee football lost running backs coach David Johnson to the Florida State Seminoles, defensive line coach Tracy Rocker to the South Carolina Gamecocks, inside linebackers coach and special teams coordinator Kevin Sherrer to the New York Giants and inside linebackers coach and co-defensive coordinator Chris Rumph to the Houston Texans. So they lost a lot.

Pruitt made numerous changes as a result. He brought in three new staff members and promoted a fourth to replace those guys, and part of that promotion meant moving another staff member to another role. So he had five staff changes overall.

In this post, we’re going to rank those staff changes by the positive impact we project them to have on Rocky Top. Our criteria does not just include what we think of the coach. It includes the role he is about to play and who he is replacing.

All of these guys could end up working out, to be fair, and any one of them could turn into a disaster. We don’t know what’s going to happen until we see them on the field. But this is a ranking based on how much of an upgrade, or potentially downgrade, we project each move will end up being.

So let’s go ahead and get started with it. This is how all five offseason staff moves stack up against each other in terms of the positive impact they are likely to have on Tennessee football going forward.