Tennessee football: Ranking Vols 10 NFL Draft classes after unranked bowl seasons

Last year was the 11th season Tennessee football made a bowl game with no top 25 finish. Here are the Volunteers’ other 10 ensuing NFL Draft classes ranked.

Six different Tennessee football head coaches have presided over a team that reached a bowl game but finished the season unranked in both major polls. Jeremy Pruitt became the most recent one to do it just this past year, bringing the total number of teams to do that to 11 overall. But what happens to the NFL Draft classes that follow those seasons?

The previous 10 seasons have brought about mixed emotions. In some cases, UT dramatically underachieved by finishing the year unranked. However, others represented a turning point and a program on the rise after the surprise bowl appearance.

Measuring the level of overachieving or underachieving could potentially come down to NFL Draft classes. In some cases, Tennessee football has had elite classes from such teams, meaning that, despite what the morale was surrounding the season, they somewhat underachieved.

In this post, we’re going to rank the previous 10 draft classes that came from Vols programs finishing the year unranked and with no bowl appearance. Sometimes, a loaded draft class meant a significant drop-off the next year. Other times, there was no draft class and a dramatic improvement into the next year.

Then there are extenuating circumstances, such as injuries piling on one year or, as in with this class, the number of players in the class being small while the overall production is large. Simply put, there are clearly cases where such a team that made a bowl but finished unranked loads up a draft class, and there are cases where they don’t.

Our criteria for these rankings include how deep the classes were and the success of the players in the pros. We’ll also look at the unsigned free agents as a bonus, and that has certainly been happening in recent years.

Given how rare bowl games were in the mid-20th century, the Vols didn’t start making bowls while finishing unranked until the late 1970s. So let’s go ahead and take a look at all of them. This is our ranking of Tennessee football’s 10 NFL Draft classes that came after a year in which they made a bowl game but finished unranked in both major polls.