Tennessee football: Vols five deepest NFL Draft classes with no first-round picks

Some of Tennessee football’s best NFL Draft classes came without a first round pick. Here are the top five in Volunteers history.

As the 2020 NFL Draft began, there was an outside chance that Tennessee football would have one player taken late in the first round. However, Darrell Taylor’s name wasn’t called, meaning the Vols once again failed to have a first-round pick.

But anybody who follows football knows that draft classes don’t stop at the end of the first round. In the current format, they go seven rounds deep, and historical drafts had as many as 16 rounds. It’s possible to find a player anywher.

If you look at the history of Tennessee football, you’ll see many elite NFL Draft classes that had no first-rounders. Some of the Vols’ greatest players in the pros were later-round picks, and some of them signed as undrafted free agents.

In this post, we’re going to rank the deepest draft classes from Rocky Top. Our criteria for this is simple. We’re looking at how many people were selected in a certain draft. This post does not take into account the NFL productivity of the draft picks.

There is one caveat, however. Ever since the draft settled on seven rounds in the mid-1990s, there has never been a year with more than 262 players selected as actual draft picks. As a result, we will count only picks that go that deep. Now, for older draft classes, if we need a tiebreaker, we may look in later rounds. Otherwise, we eliminate anything after 262 picks.

Even with that criteria, however, you’ll notice a lot of quality draft classes over the past few decades that came from Rocky Top, and a first-rounder was not needed to make that the case. They may not be the best classes ever, but they were pretty good.

So which groups fit this criteria? How far back can we go to find such quality groups? Let’s break all of that down here. These are Tennessee football’s five deepest NFL Draft classes that did not have a first-round pick.