Many legends in Tennessee football history got their start replacing injured players. Here are 10 Volunteers who became famous in that role.
For a long time, Tennessee football has always had a next man up mentality. Injuries are part of the game, and ever since the Vols took recruiting to a national level in the Johnny Majors era, they have created numerous legends who burst onto the scene replacing other injured stars.
If that national recruiting mentality existed during the Robert Neyland years, the Vols may have won the Rose Bowl at the end of the 1939 season to make sure they remained undefeated, untied and unscored upon beyond the regular season. A George Cafego injury cost them that chance.
Of course, Cafego became an assistant to Tennessee football in the 1950s and lasted through the 1980s, so he played a huge role in watching it grow to the point that it could replace injured talent. As his injury was the most devastating in history to the outcome of a Vols season, it would make sense that he would try to turn the program into one that never had that issue again.
Well, the year after he retired, Rocky Top had built a level of depth that numerous people became Vol legends after they filled in for injured players. In this post, we’re going to take a look at those players who did that.
To qualify for this list, a player has to have earned his first start as a result of an injury elsewhere and then created a name for himself, either in that season or future seasons. It’s pretty self-explanatory whether or not a player created a name for himself.
This is not to say that the players they replaced weren’t often valuable themselves. It’s just that their replacements became stars picking up the slack in their absence. How often did this happen. What level of legendary status did these players reach? Let’s break it all down here. These are Tennessee football’s 10 greatest injury replacement players in history.