Even if it’s a bit overblown, offense is clearly the strength of Tennessee football heading into Josh Heupel’s second year on the job. That doesn’t mean every individual offensive unit is better than every individual defensive one, though. In fact, despite some issues and concerns, the Vols have some strong units on both sides of the ball.
They also have weak units on both sides of the ball. As we get set to rank all the position groups for the Vols heading into this year, we’ll take into account how they performed last year, who’s coming in and who’s returning. Although offensive units will be higher, it’s not across the board.
This won’t be the same as the spring practice position rankings, as those were based on how the units performed specifically in spring ball, and the personnel is wildly different now in some cases. Using the other evidence we have, this is a projected ranking of Tennessee football’s 10 position groups heading into this season.
10. Linebacker
No unit has more returning production for the Vols than linebacker, and at least one of them, Jeremy Banks, has All-SEC caliber talent. However, in general, returning production at this position isn’t necessarily a good thing for the Vols. There’s no way around the fact that the linebackers played awful overall last year.
Banks, Aaron Beasley and Solon Page III were the three rotational linebackers and had the three lowest PFF regular season grades of anybody who played 100 snaps on defense. Although Banks leads all returning SEC linebackers in tackles and solo tackles, that’s an issue.
At the core of the problem is containment. None of them were great when it came to containing quarterbacks in spy, and caused too many issues. Help is on the way with Juwan Mitchell getting healthy and a slew of newcomers, but Brian Jean-Mary still has a lot of work to do. Without a splash newcomer, Tennessee football’s linebackers remain down here.