Tennessee football: Four Vols whose return to health could help in 2020

Four Volunteers players had injuries that kept them from being effective for Tennessee football in 2020. Here is how their returns can have an impact.

Injuries are always a part of the game. Ever since Jeremy Pruitt took over and dramatically changed the medical and conditioning personnel, Tennessee football has suffered far fewer bad breaks when it comes to that front.

However, the Vols are not immune to it, and last year, as Pruitt was still building his program, a couple of key injuries wrecked his team at the start of the year. That’s why they went 0-2 to open up the season with two losses to Group of Five teams at home.

What came out of that, though, was Tennessee football being able to develop lots more young talent than Pruitt initially planned to. As a result, these guys potentially coming back now just make the Vols much deeper than they were probably going to be.

As they continue to be on a roll, we’re going to look at the players who are returning to health after missing most of last season. There were four key players who missed the majority of the year and also did not finish the season. They have to meet both criteria for us to discuss them on this list.

Whether or not they are all back for spring practice remains to be seen. What’s clear, though, is all of them will be a major help to Rocky Top with their return. We are going to rank whose return will help UT the most.

That doesn’t just take into account the talent of the players. It also analyzes the depth of each position and what the production was like last year among the returning players. All of those things matter when looking at this.

So which players are we talking about? How missed were they throughout last season? Let’s go ahead and break that all down now. This is our ranking of the four players whose return to help will benefit Tennessee football in a big way.