Tennessee football: Outlet nails why Cedric Tillman is underrated

He’s on the 2022 preseason watch lists for the Maxwell Award, the Fred Biletnikoff Award and the Walter Camp Award. By that estimation, Tennessee football wide receiver Cedric Tillman doesn’t seem that underrated at all heading into the year.

However, Matt Howe of 247Sports named him one of the 11 most underrated offensive players and 18 most underrated players in general for the year. When you take a look at his standard, not only does he have a point, but his point isn’t even hammered home strongly enough.

Although he is getting respect from the awards, Howe notes that many preseason outlets are ignoring Tillman in their previews when it comes to honors like All-Conference or All-American. Here’s what he said about Tennessee football’s go-to wideout.

"Tillman came out of virtually nowhere to catch 64 passes for 1,081 yards and 12 touchdowns, benefitting from new coach Josh Heupel’s explosive offensive system. He is the SEC’s top returning receiver in terms of production, yet can barely scratch honorable mention on most preseason All-American teams. There is no reason to think he will not improve across the board with star quarterback Hendon Hooker back at the helm, so it will be pretty hard to ignore him."

There’s obviously a lot of truth to that. In fact, in an even more official way, Tillman isn’t getting the respect from the media that cover him. Somehow he was named Second Team All-SEC in the official media preseason picks for the league last week, something we slammed.

As Howe noted, Tillman is the top producer among all returning receivers in the SEC, and he’s also likely to see more targets this year with Velus Jones Jr. and JaVonta Payton gone. Add in Hendon Hooker returning, and it’s hard to not make him first team.

Of course, there is the argument that Jones and Payton not being there to take pressure off of him could make things harder, and you could have concerns about UT losing Kodi Burns as wide receivers coach and replacing him with an unknown in Kelsey Pope. Those are minor things to bring up when discussing Tillman.

On the other hand, neither of those factors would make sense in justifying an expected massive drop-off in production. We’re talking about the first 1,000-yard receiver to return to Rocky Top since Kelley Washington in 2002, and Washington got hurt that following year.

Unless the projection is that Tillman would get hurt, and there’s no reason to assume that, Tennessee football should have the best target in the SEC and one of the best in the nation. This explains how, despite being on these watch lists, Tillman is still drastically underrated.