Vols’ progress will show if consistently competitive
KNOXVILLE — Being “on schedule” is an intriguing description.
It means that everything is going according to plan. It means that, with no mistakes, everything will go as expected.
It’s currently hard to gauge if that’s the case at the University of Tennessee, where the rebuilding of a once-proud football program has taken far longer than anybody expected. Since December of 2017, it’s been Jeremy Pruitt’s job to make that happen, but even the five-time national champion has found the sledding to be far more difficult as, with each passing year, the legend of the 1998 national championship fades that much further away and the legend of the program that’s top-10 all-time in victories in NCAA history continues to sink deeper into oblivion.
Try selling prospects that something that happened in 1998 is equally as impressive now (Have you tried showing a teenager a football or basketball game from the 1990s?). The 2001 season was the last time the Volunteers were nationally relevant: Try getting kids to believe that the same thing can happen again, especially as they see that every other program in the Southeastern Conference — aside from the Vols and Vanderbilt — has won at least 10 games once this decade.
That’s the uphill battle Pruitt is facing heading into his second preseason camp, which will begin Friday afternoon at Haslam Field: Getting players — and fans — to believe in his vision of making Tennessee relevant again.
He’s got the pieces, and the schedule, to have a solid season. Jarrett Guarantano, I feel, is an excellent quarterback. Sure, he’s probably too careful for some people’s liking, but as long as he can keep the chains moving with what’s expected to be improvements on the line and with good if not spectacular skill-position players, he’ll have an excellent junior year.
He better, because if not it’s just as likely the Vols repeat last season’s 5-7 record as it is to living up to projections that have them winning seven or eight games. Defensively there are a lot of questions on the front seven, but for those people who use recruiting services to tell them how good a player is, Tennessee seems to have a lot of players with a lot of stars next to their names. That has to matter, right?
It’s a good schedule that’s slightly easier than in years past, but this isn’t the Tennessee of years past. So while Vols fans are screaming about how easy their nonconference schedule is, BYU — the team’s marquee nonconference matchup — is fist-pumping the fact that it’s Tennessee on the schedule and not Wisconsin, LSU, West Virginia or Michigan. For every Tennessee fan yelling, “I’m glad we’ve got BYU on the schedule. That’s a winnable nonconference game,” there’s a BYU fan screaming, “Man, I’m glad we’ve got Tennessee on the schedule. That’s a winnable nonconference game.”
In fact, to every team on Tennessee’s schedule not named Georgia State, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga or Alabama-Birmingham, the opposing team’s fans view the game against the Vols as a win. That’s the state of affairs for Pruitt, and the challenge that he continues to face: Nobody fears Tennessee as a football program, and the Vols can’t take any game for granted, because they’re no longer that type of program.
The Vols will be better. What better is won’t come down to wins and losses but more in how competitive they are in every game. Say the Vols win eight games but get blown out by Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Missouri. Are they a better team because they won eight games? Or did the schedule just get easier?
If they win six or seven games but are competitive in all 12, including the losses, that would probably do a lot to suggest that the current staff is one that could make the Vols a major player in arguably the best league in the country, with a talented roster that’s sure to be deeper as the staff continues to plug holes with talented additions.
And being competitive in the third year of a major rebuilding of a program? Can’t get much more on schedule that that. Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3 or at Facebook. com/VolsUpdate.