These pro teams have the most Tennessee football Volunteers entering the season.
A dominant run in the late 1990s and early 2000s built years of credibility for Tennessee football in the NFL. There would be multiple teams each year who had three to five starters all from the Vols, and everybody on Rocky Top new which pro teams they were.
It peaked in the 2015 season, when the greatest UT pro player ever, Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos and walked into retirement. That Denver team also had Britton Colquitt starting at punter and Malik Jackson at defensive tackle. Colquitt punted multiple times, Manning was the quarterback and Jackson had a defensive touchdown.
Since then, however, the number of Tennessee football players in the pros has been slowly shrinking due to years of ineptitude. No players being drafted in 2015, 2016 and 2019 made for a disaster, and now, UT players aren’t likely to have too many friends from college on a pro team.
However, there are still some franchises that lean a bit heavily on Rocky Top. Entering the 2020 season, five NFL teams have more than one Vol on their 53-man rosters. Another four have a one player on their roster with a second on their practice squad.
In this post, we’re going to rank the five teams with the most projected NFL productivity from the Vols heading into 2020. Our criteria takes into account number of players on the roster but it also factors in what those players are projected to be.
There may not be any 2015 Denvers on here, but there are still some teams relying heavily on former Vols. A couple of them also may be Super Bowl contenders, and many are built up with UT players who weren’t even drafted.
So which franchises are we talking about? How loaded are they? Let’s go ahead and break all of that down here. These are the five NFL teams with the most projected productivity from Tennessee football heading into the season.