Tennessee football’s top 10 injury concerns for 2020

These are the Tennessee football Volunteers most vulnerable to injury in 2020.

If there’s one area in which Jeremy Pruitt has dramatically improved Tennessee football, it’s on the injury front. A major issue under Butch Jones was the subpar conditioning, and it wrecked the program in late 2016 and all of 2017.

Three different people running the strength and conditioning program in Jones’ final three years, including one year without a strength coach, and then a fourth person running it Pruitt’s first year, created a huge lack of stability in conditioning. Now, Pruitt has had to replace Craig Fitzgerald, who left for the New York Giants, with AJ Artis.

However, even with that change, there is a level of stability in Tennessee football conditioning that simply didn’t exist under Jones. That stability resulted in very few players missing the season last year down the stretch.

In addition to changes in conditioning, Pruitt also oversaw changes in practice habits, which he noted was an issue within his first two months on campus. More physical practices and adding weight to his players helped to fix a lot of these issues.

That doesn’t change the fact that every program goes through injuries, though. Last year, as Pruitt was still trying to build the program, a couple of key injuries played a huge role in the Vols’ 0-2 start that nearly derailed the season.

Entering 2020, assuming there’s a season, numerous players have suffered season-ending injuries with the program in the past. As a result, in this post, we’re going to look at the players who bring the biggest injury concerns.

We’ll evaluate players based on the quantity of injuries they have suffered, the severity of those injuries and the recency of those injuries. Also, since this deals with the program as a whole, we’ll also look at how valuable each player is. So let’s get started. These are Tennessee football’s 10 biggest injury concerns for 2020.