Tennessee football: Top five NFL careers of Vols drafted in final round

Jauan Jennings joins a long list of Tennessee football taken in the last round of the NFL Draft. Here are five such Volunteers who had the best pro careers.

There were probably numerous factors to former Tennessee football wide receiver Jauan Jennings falling to the seventh round of the 2020 NFL Draft. The most recent one was likely his 40-time, which was 4.72 seconds at the combine.

However, Jennings landed in a great spot, with a San Francisco 49ers team that just missed out on winning the Super Bowl, has an opening at receiver with the departure of Emmanuel Sanders and doesn’t have any big targets at the position. He has a chance to make an immediate impact.

If Jennings does that, he’ll join a pretty small list of Tennessee football players who were able to carve out successful pro careers despite going so late in the draft. After all, being taken in the final round means there aren’t high expectations for a player to succeed.

Still, the Vols have a few players to provide Jennings hope. In this post, we’re going to look at those players who had solid careers that he will want to emulate. Some of them actually had amazing careers, among the best to come from Rocky Top.

Our criteria for this post is simply to value the pro careers of players who were former Vols and taken in the final round of the draft. This doesn’t include undrafted free agents, who actually may have a better track record than people taken in this round.

Anyway, the round itself varies. After all, the NFL Draft has had 32, 30, 17, 12 and eight total rounds throughout its history. It’s been reliably seven rounds since 1994, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t Vols players taken in later rounds in previous drafts who won’t make the list. They just have to be taken in the final round of a draft, whatever the last round was that year.

So let’s go ahead and break down the players we’re talking about. These are the five Tennessee football players with the greatest pro careers among Vols who were taken in the last round of an NFL Draft.