These are the top five Tennessee football Volunteers juniors for this year.
It’s pretty clear what impact freshmen had on Tennessee football during Jeremy Pruitt’s second season as the Vols won six straight to finish the year with an 8-5 record. Given the fact that the 2019 recruiting class was Pruitt’s first full class, it made sense that would happen.
However, Pruitt still had some impact on the 2018 class, even if he had no impact on the 2017 class that saw guys redshirt. Those two types of players are now entering their junior or redshirt junior years on Rocky Top, and some of them are looking to have a major bounce in production.
There are actually quite a few juniors in the Tennessee football program who have proven their value, even if they all haven’t reached star potential yet. With key losses last year, this might be the season it happens.
In this post, we’re going to continue with our rankings of Vols by year, this time looking at the junior class. This list has one redshirt junior on here and, at the risk of giving him away already, a junior who transferred into the program.
At least one player on here is a rising superstar, but another is a potential superstar. One had a mini-breakout season last year, and two more have proven their reliability as starters but haven’t reached star quality just yet.
For many of these players, now is the time to prove their talent. There could be up to 10 juniors starting in different positions this year, but only one is 100 percent locked in as a starter with no competition entering the season.
Who are the others? Which ones made this list? Knowing that these rankings are all about projections but also use what people have done as indicators, let’s go ahead and look at some upperclassmen for UT. These are Tennessee football’s top five juniors entering the 2020 season.