Ranking Tennessee football seasons with 4th-year starting QB

In 2020, Jarrett Guarantano could join a rare club of Tennessee football Volunteers quarterbacks.

Senior quarterbacks are nothing new for Tennessee football. Ever since Doug Dickey installed the T-formation in the 1960s and put a focus on the passing game, the Vols have had over a dozen senior quarterbacks start a season.

However, having a senior quarterback who is in his fourth year as a starter is a different story. To be in that club, they have to have started every season dating back to their freshman year. Alan Cockrell was the first freshman in program history to start at quarterback for the Vols back in 1981, and he didn’t even play his senior season.

In fact, only four quarterbacks have started for Tennessee football as freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. If Jarrett Guarantano is the starter when this year begins, he’ll be the fifth quarterback to reach that list.

Before looking ahead to that, though, we’re going to rank the Vols’ seasons when they had a fourth-year starting quarterback. To qualify for this list, the season had to have a starting senior quarterback who also started games as a freshman, sophomore and junior.

To be fair, they don’t have to have started every game in those seasons. Guarantano didn’t start every game in 2017 or 2019. But they have to have started a string of games in each, enough to say they had an impact.

Obviously, we’ll judge the seasons on a variety of things, including wins, rankings and championships. However, the play of the quarterback will be irrelevant. This is just looking at how the Vols perform overall with such seniors.

Spoiler alert, though: All of these seasons saw great years by the  quarterbacks. There’s a reason they were starting as seniors to begin with. So let’s go ahead and break these years down. Here is our ranking of Tennessee football’s four previous seasons with a fourth-year starting quarterback.