Author Archives: Joel Hollingsworth

Tennessee linebacker Darrin Kirkland Jr. to transfer

Vols linebacker Darrin Kirkland Jr. announced via Twitter late this afternoon that he is electing to leave Tennessee for another school as a graduate transfer:

 

First of all, best of luck to Kirkland.

But there’s no getting around it: This is a big loss for Tennessee. Here’s what we wrote about Kirkland in our Vols preseason magazine this year:

Perhaps the biggest key to the success of the Tennessee
linebacking corps this fall is the return of Kirkland. Kirkland
made the All-SEC Freshman Team in 2015 after playing
in all 13 games and starting 10 of them. After injuring his
ankle in the second game of the 2016 season, he played in
only eight games and wasn’t the same even when he was on
the field. Last fall, a knee injury in fall camp sidelined him
for the entire season. This offseason, he had another minor
knee surgery, but made it back onto the practice field late in
spring camp. He’s expected to be back and healthy this fall,
but whether he can stay that way is the question weighing on
everyone’s minds. If he can, he will be a difference-maker.

So much for that.

And so much for Brad’s “Hey, at least nobody’s transferred!” post from yesterday. Yes, we’re blaming him, and so should you.

Gameday Today: When Al Wilson gets hyped, it’s time to get hyped

Football

We are (probably!) under 100 days (or so!) away from football season!

When Al Wilson gets hyped, it’s time to get hyped. And Al Wilson is hyped about the return of Phillip Fulmer and the arrival of Jeremy Pruitt.

News Flash. An anonymous opposing coach tells Lindy’s that Butch Jones didn’t do a good job last year. If I was still 14, I would say, “Duh.” If I was 8, I’d say, “A-doy.”

Good news. Brad thinks that the lack of expected post-coaching-change attrition may signal that the players currently on Tennessee’s roster actually want to be coached.

A year early, but we’ll take it. Jimmy Hyams hits the gas by reminding Vols fans of the first-year-to-second-year jumps at LSU by Nick Saban, at Alabama by Saban, with Mark Richt and Kirby Smart at Georgia, and Bob Stoops at Oklahoma. He then slams on the brakes:

But you wonder if Saban or Richt or Stoops or Smart faced at their new schools what Pruitt faces at Tennessee.

Yeah.

Saturday Down South asks Pruitt some interesting questions, including his thoughts on how recruiting has changed recently and which positions he thinks have the best opportunity for early playing time.

Coach Pruitt continues to Say Stuff during his Big Orange Caravan Tour, and he’s apparently making more of an effort to not rub fans the wrong way.

Also this: GoVols247 is ranking the entire Tennessee roster. Here’s Nos. 45-31. . . . The Vols have hired VFL CJ Fayton as Director of VFL Programming.

Hoops

Tennessee’s basketball team will play Gonzaga in Phoenix on December 9 this fall. It should be a good one, as the Vols are No. 3 in Gary Parrish’s preseason Top 25 and Gonzaga is No. 5. Tennessee is also likely to host either Kansas (No. 1) or West Virginia (No. 17) in this season’s Big 12/SEC Challenge.

Awwww. Admiral Schofield got up at 4:00 a.m. to watch the royal wedding with his mother.

Other fun stuff

Ladies and gentlemen, Terry Fair:

Tennessee is winning at APR.

SB Nation has everything you need to know about the recent Supreme Court ruling on sports betting.

Vols hoops hits No. 3 in CBSSports’ preseason Top 25

CBSSports‘ Gary Parrish published his college hoops Top 25 yesterday, and he has the Vols slotted in at No. 3. Tennessee’s in lofty company, as Kansas and Duke come in at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively. There’s another basketball blueblood on the other side of UT, too, with the SEC rival Kentucky taking up residence at the fourth position.

Gonzaga, Virginia, Villanova (only because of the presumed early departures of a couple of guys to the NBA), Nevada, North Carolina, and Auburn round out the Top 10.

Ever since the hoops season concluded, it hasn’t been unheard of to see Tennessee in next season’s preseason Top 10, but No. 3 is as high as I’ve seen. Why is Parrish that bullish on the Vols?

Tennessee should return most of the important pieces from a team that shared the SEC regular-season title. More specifically, the top six scorers are back — among them SEC Player of the Year Grant Williams. So it’ll come as no surprise when the Vols finish at, or near, the top of the league again.

Sounds reasonable, as everyone expects Admiral Schofield to return despite having been testing the NBA waters himself. Only James Daniel is gone from last year’s team, one that won the right to wear those SEC Championship t-shirts, and Richmond graduate transfer Khwan Fore has committed to the Vols.

It’s not a given that even a team with an identical roster to last year would necessarily be able to duplicate or surpass its success. After all, the circumstances have changed. They’ll now be the hunted, and they’ll have to transition from negative motivation (no one believing in them) to something else. But if they can manage those things, it should be a fun season this fall for Vols hoops.

Tennessee hires VFL CJ Fayton as Director of VFL Programming

Tennessee AD Phillip Fulmer announced yesterday that he has hired VFL CJ Fayton as Director of VFL Programming.

What, exactly, does a “Director of VFL Programming” do, you ask? Fayton will reportedly be responsible for helping current student-athletes (in all sports, not just football) with career and professional development and also for keeping other VFLs actively involved with Tennessee. He’ll work under the direction of Fulmer and interact with alumni relations and the marketing department.

As a wide receiver at Tennessee from 2002-05, Fayton earned SEC All-Academic Team honors twice. He also played on the basketball team a short time during the 2000-01 season. He received a degree in Sport Management in 2005, a Master’s degree in Recreation Administration in 2008, and a juris doctorate in 2014. He’s also served as a development assistant with Tennessee’s VASF staff, a recruiting assistant and graduate assistant for the football program, an assistant coach at Norfolk State (2010-11), a compliance assistant at Vanderbilt (2012-13), and a law clerk a year before getting his law degree from UT Law School in 2014. Most recently, he was Associate Athletics Director at Maryville College.

 

Starter continuity in the SEC

Every year when I am deep in the throes of the final sprint for the Gameday on Rocky Top magazine, my subconscious bombards me with new questions that I’d love to know the answers to but don’t have the time or space to address in the magazine. One of those questions this year concerns the degree to which starter continuity impacts a team.

We’ve been using games played and started as sort of a rough proxy for experience for a couple of years now, but we’ve not really looked very closely at the issue from the standpoint of team continuity. As I started doing so, I quickly realized that these are deep waters, so with this post, we’re just wading in to see if the water’s warm.

I looked at every SEC team and pulled out every player who started every game for his team last season. The data is at the end of the post, but here are a few quickie questions and tentative answers.

How many guys should a team expect to start every game each season?

The answer to this question is depressingly low, but not altogether unexpected for a collision sport like football. Here’s the summary from the 2017 season:

  • 11 — Ole Miss
  • 10 — South Carolina
  • 9 — Florida, Alabama, Arkansas
  • 8 — Georgia, Missouri, Vanderbilt, LSU, Mississippi State
  • 7 — Kentucky, Auburn
  • 5 — Tennessee
  • 2 — Texas A&M

Based solely on last year’s data, a team can reasonably expect only 7-9 guys to start every game. Even under the best of circumstances, half of the guys who take the first snap of the season on offense or defense are going down, one way or another.

Ole Miss led the SEC last fall with 11 guys starting every game, but the majority of the teams were bunched right around eight players going wire-to-wire as starters. As you’d expect, Tennessee didn’t fare well with only five, but A&M was even less fortunate with only two.

Does starter continuity correlate to winning?

Somewhat surprisingly, early returns on this question look like, “Nope.” Ole Miss had the best starter continuity last fall but finished with a 6-6 (3-5) record. The Aggies had the fewest number of guys starting every game, and they finished better than the Rebels with a record of 7-6 (4-4). The two SEC teams that played for the national championship were right in the middle of the pack, no better than teams like Vanderbilt and Arkansas, who finished toward the bottom of the league.

If overall starter continuity matters at all, it matters much less than things like overall team talent, player development, and coaching. That’s not shocking, but finding that it might not matter at all is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

Are certain position groups more important to starter continuity?

Hmm. Maybe? Here’s the position group breakdown.

  • OL — 29
  • DBs — 21
  • DL — 20
  • LBs — 15
  • QBs — 7
  • RBs — 6
  • WRs — 5
  • TEs — 5

Just going by the rough numbers, it looks like there’s not much to see here. But when you start looking closer at the positions and the teams’ records and conference standings, you start to get the feeling that starter continuity at quarterback may matter, and it may matter a lot.

The SEC’s top teams all had the same starting quarterbacks for nearly the entire season. Jalen Hurts started every game for national champion Alabama, as did Jarrett Stidham for SEC West Division Champ Auburn. SEC Champ Georgia’s Jake Fromm didn’t start every game, but he only missed it by a portion of one quarter, as Jacob Eason started the first game but went down on the second offensive possession. Fromm took over at that point and went the distance as the starter. Georgia also played more games than any other team (15), so it’s essentially as close to starting every game as a guy can get without actually doing it. (As an aside, Florida played only 11 games to Georgia’s 15.)

The other SEC teams at the top of their division standings also had their starting quarterbacks the entire way: Jake Bentley for South Carolina, Stephen Johnson for Kentucky, Drew Lock for Missouri, and Danny Etling for LSU. We’ll keep an eye on that this fall.

Here’s the data, ordered by division standings:

SEC EAST

Georgia (8) (13-2, 7-1)

Aaron Davis DB
J.R. Reed DB
Dominick Sanders DB
Roquan Smith LB
Lamont Gaillard OL
Andrew Thomas OL
Isaiah Wynn OL
Nick Chubb RB

South Carolina (10) (9-4, 5-3)

Jamarcus King DB
Chris Lammons DB
Taylor Stallworth DL
D.J. Wonnum DL
T.J. Brunson LB
Skai Moore LB
Alan Knott OL
Jake Bentley QB
Hayden Hurst TE
Bryan Edwards WR

Kentucky (7) (7-6, 4-4)

Mike Edwards DB
Adrian Middleton DL
Courtney Love LB
Kyle Meadows OL
Logan Stenberg OL
Stephen Johnson QB
Benny Snell RB

Missouri (8) (7-6, 4-4)

Marcell Frazier DL
Jordan Harold DL
Cale Garrett LB
Terez Hall LB
Paul Adams OL
Trystan Castillo OL
Tre’Vour Simms OL
Drew Lock QB

Florida (9) (4-7, 3-5)

Duke Dawson DB
Chauncey Gardiner DB
Marco Wilson DB
Taven Bryan DL
Khairi Clark DL
David Reese LB
Martez Ivey OL
Jawaan Taylor OL
C’Yontai Lewis TE

Vanderbilt (8) (5-7, 1-7)

Ladarius Wiley DB
Joejuan Williams DB
Nifae Lealao DL
Bruno Reagan OL
Justin Skule OL
Kyle Shurmur QB
Ralph Webb RB
Charles Wright RB

Tennessee (5) (4-8, 0-8)

Micah Abernathy DB
Nigel Warrior DB
Kendal Vickers DL
Trey Smith OL
Ethan Wolf TE

SEC WEST

Auburn (7) (10-4, 7-1)

Stephen Roberts DB
Derrick Brown DL
Dontavius Russell DL
Jeff Holland LB
Austin Golson OL
Braden Smith OL
Jarrett Stidham QB

Alabama (9) (13-1, 7-1)

Anthony Averett DB
Ronnie Harrison DB
Da’Ron Payne DL
Bradley Bozeman OL
Jonah Williams OL
Matt Womack OL
Jalen Hurts QB
Damien Harris RB
Calvin Ridley WR

LSU (8) (9-4, 6-2)

Andraez Williams DB
Greg Gilmore DL
Christian LaCouture DL
Devin White LB
Garrett Brumfield OL
William Clapp OL
Danny Etling QB
Foster Moreau TE

Mississippi State (8) (9-4, 4-4)

Jeffery Simmons DL
Gerri Green LB
Montez Sweat LB
Deion Calhoun OL
Elgton Jenkins OL
Stewart Reese OL
Darryl Williams OL
Farrod Green TE

Texas A&M (2) (7-6, 4-4)

Kingsley Keke DL
Otaro Alaka LB

Ole Miss (11) (6-6, 3-5)

A.J. Moore DB
Josiah Coatney DL
Marquis Haynes DL
Demarquis Gates LB
Greg Little OL
Javon Patterson OL
Rod Taylor OL
Jordan Wilkins RB
A.J. Brown WR
Damarkus Lodge WR
D.K. Metcalf WR

Arkansas (9) (4-8, 1-7)

Josh Liddell DB
Santos Ramirez DB
Henre’ Toliver DB
Bijhon Jackson DL
T.J. Smith DL
Dre Greenlaw LB
De’Jon Harris LB
Hjalte Froholdt OL
Johnny Gibson Jr. OL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GET READY FOR THE SEASON WITH THE GAMEDAY ON ROCKY TOP 2018 MAGAZINE

Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 hits the newsstands all over the state of Tennessee (and select locations in neighboring states) later this month, but as a reader of this website, you can get it before then, and with free shipping to boot.

Pre-order Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 online, and we’ll ship it the day after we get it from the printer (which we expect to be on or before Wednesday, 5/16/18), Plus, you’ll get FREE SHIPPING (a savings of $4.95). So basically, you’ll have it delivered right to your door for the same price you’d pay at the grocery store, plus, if you order before Monday, 5/14/18, you’ll likely have it in your hands before it even shows up on the newsstands.

Free shipping will show up as an option automatically as long as you have the magazine in your cart.

Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 will only be available on newsstands in Tennessee and in limited areas in neighboring states, so if you live outside those areas, order online. And heck, even if you live in Tennessee, order online anyway this week and get it early.

As always, we had an awesome time writing the annual this year. The more we wrote and the more we thought about it, the more we concluded that the Jeremy Pruitt era holds promise because the man is intensely focused on one thing and one thing only: Football. He’s not wasting any time on false bravado, wardrobe decisions, or colorful metaphors on the virtues of patience.
Here’s the Table of Contents for this year’s edition:

Table of Contents

2018 TENNESSEE VOLS

5 Position Previews
By Joel Hollingsworth
Unsolved mysteries abound for the 2018 Vols

22 2018 Numerical Roster

23 Rocky Top Revolution
By Celina Summers
The day common fans became as influential as big boosters

27 Southern Stability
By Brad Shepard 
Pruitt’s first staff heavy on SEC experience

31 Class of ’18
By Brad Shepard
Pruitt welcomes a new group to Rocky Top

ANTICIPATING 2018

43 The 2018 Schedule
By Joel Hollingsworth
Several opportunities await the Vols this fall

53 Tennessee’s 2018 Schedule at a Glance

ORANGE-HUED HISTORY

55 Pruitt’s Priors
By Will Shelton
Jeremy Pruitt’s defensive resume is elite

59 Horseshoes, Hand Grenades
By Will Shelton
The best way to win close games is not to play them

AROUND THE SEC

65 SEC Team Profiles
By Joel Hollingsworth
The race to Atlanta

94 SEC Schedule at a Glance

95 The Coaching Carousel
By Brad Shepard
Six SEC schools made changes at the top this season

97 Gameday 2018 Preseason All-SEC Teams
By the Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 Staff
Our list of the best SEC players heading into 2018

98 Gameday Top 25
By the Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 Staff
Our preseason favorites for 2018

104 Team Talent Rankings
By Joel Hollingsworth
Ranking the contenders for 2018 by talent

107 Ranking the SEC Class of 2018

Gameday Today: Special ICY(&I)MI edition

The end of a couple of long seasons is a fine time to catch your breath and maybe focus on a few things you’ve been neglecting for a bit too long. There will be no condemnation here because that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the past week. For me, I devoted a day or two to digesting the Loyola-Chicago loss and then became a fan of the team, rooting them on to the Final Four. I’m hoping they win the whole thing. I’ve also been attending to some other business matters in much need of such attention and working on getting our annual magazine on pace to get to the printer on time in late April.

All that is to explain why this is a special ICYMI edition of our usually-more-regular Vols link dump. Mostly, it’s because I would have otherwise missed it, but I’m guessing that many of you might be in the same boat. So, let’s catch up together.

The Vols’ coaching search FOIA data dump

Yeah. This was big, and there’s a lot to process, but one of the best articles on the subject is this one from Celina Summers. Celina, by the way, has contributed an article on the topic to our magazine this year as well. She does a great job, and we’re happy to have her contributing this year.

Say Goodbye to Basketball

Rick Barnes had his post-season debriefing with the media a couple of days ago and said mostly what you’d expect him to say, but it’s still refreshing:

And no, we’re not being picked to finish 13th in the SEC next season. We already being picked first:

Say Hello to Football

The smell of fresh cut grass. The daffodils and tulips sticking their beautiful noses into the sky.

And guys running around in shoulder pads and shorts to the glorious noise of whistles and shouts:

And all of it happening under the no-nonsense leadership of Jeremy Pruitt:

Pruitt is either (a) not big on praise, or (b) lacking much to praise, as sweet nothings from the lips of the head coach are pretty sparse these days. He sounds like he’s in full-on evaluation mode, and he’s not yet drawn any conclusions about anything.

You can, however, begin to discern what is especially important to him from the few words he does utter:

“The first thing we talked about is that we want to become a team, we think that’s important for us,” Pruitt said. “We want to learn how to practice, we want to see how much knowledge we retain at each individual position and we want to see who the competitors are, we want to see who handles adversity.”

So, we didn’t know how to practice, we’re having to re-teach them everything, and we’re not sure yet which ones have the mental fortitude to do what we’re asking. Whew. Okay.

There’s also this bit that I found particularly interesting:

“Sometimes you get beat because the other guy’s better than you, and sometimes you get beat because maybe you don’t execute it the right way,” Pruitt said. “If the other team beats us because they’re better than us, that’s one thing, but when you make mental errors, which we made a lot of mental errors out there today. We were not very focused in the meetings and didn’t take what we went over in meetings to the field. That probably contributed to some of it.”

Most of our recent football-related pain has come in the form of Tennessee losing to teams that were not better, so woo for the focus on jettisoning those first. I think most of us will be happy only losing to better teams. That has to be first, and only after that do you get to actually being the best team every week.

But while we’re not getting any opinions from the head man yet, we do have some actual news. Four players are being tested at new positions: running back Carlin Fils-aime at cornerback, tight end Princeton Fant at running back, defensive lineman Ja’Quain Blakely at tight end, and wide receiver Tyler Byrd at defensive back. Pruitt’s not sure whether any of the experiments are going to work.

Also, Quay Picou has left the program, but the absences of Darrin Kirkland Jr. and Tim Jordan are nothing to worry over, as Kirkland is recovering from a knee procedure and Jordan is recovering from appendix surgery.

And finally, the defensive-minded Pruitt was “ticked off” after practice yesterday, and it made him openly wonder about his defensive bias. Statements like that are likely to cause fans to experience anxiety borne of watching other former defensive coordinators who suddenly found themselves in head coaching gigs running feeble offenses out onto the field and hoping to win every game 3-0.

Fortunately, Pruitt seems to be aware of this potential blind spot and has not only assembled an offensive staff he trusts but has also enlisted help from John Lilly, who’s been hired as executive assistant to the head coach. Check this out:

“The first thing John does is he’s here to help me,” Pruitt said. “I think it’s clear that I want to be involved on the defensive side from a daily organization standpoint, but at the same time, we’re not going to do anything our program that I’m not aware about, that it don’t go through me.
“Now, what I don’t want to do is come in there and ask the offensive staff a million questions. ‘Why you doing this? Why you doing that?’ You’ve got a guy that can explain to me a little bit about what’s going on, so I can eliminate some of the questions.”

So, maybe Lilly is less an executive assistant and more a “Liaison to the Offense.”

Gameday Today: VFL Pro Day roundup

Yesterday was Pro Day on Rocky Top, and several former Vols football players were in action hoping to improve their NFL Draft stock.

Rashaan Gaulden

Rashaan Gaulden, of course, had to answer for probably the 100th time a question about his double-bird to the Alabama fan section last season and had what I consider to be a nearly perfect answer:

“It’s just, you know, I’m a very passionate guy when I step on the field,” Gaulden said. “I hate Alabama, and that’s just how it is. But at the same time, I’ve got to know that there’s no place in sports for that kind of thing to happen.”
“I obviously don’t want to be remembered that way at Tennessee,” he said. “I feel like I made a lot of plays and different things like that, so that’s not how I want to be remembered, but I’m gonna have to live with it. But I’ve definitely matured since then.”

More from Gaulden:

John Kelly

John Kelly had an important, if somewhat ambiguously-defined, answer for what he wanted to put up as his 40-time:

“Something that’s not slow,” he said, smiling.

More from Kelly:

Evan Berry

Now that kick return specialist Evan Berry is his own man, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands and put himself on offense:

“I was planning on doing both [offense and defense],” Berry said after his workout. “But then around mid-January, I decided that I just wanted to put all my focus into one thing and do that to the best of my ability without having to worry about two things at one time. I just chose one. Life is too short, and I chose what I really felt comfortable with and what I really wanted to do. That’s how I narrowed it down. I was pretty much determined to do it.”

More from Berry:

Kahlil McKenzie

Not to be outdone, defensive tackle Kahlil McKenzie also put in some time on the offensive side of the ball:

“A couple of coaches asked me if I’d be willing to do the drills,” McKenzie said after finishing his Pro Day workout at the Anderson Training Center, “and I told them it’s good with me, so I just went out there and did some of the O-line drills.
“That’s the first time I’ve been asked to do an offensive line type of stuff. (NFL Scouting) Combine, I did strictly D-line things. I get questions all the time sometimes about offensive line stuff, but you know, you just kind of focus on what you’re getting asked to do.”

More from McKenzie:

Trevor Daniel

And we’ve heard all of the legends about punter Trevor Daniel’s freakish athleticism (for a punter), but he says it’s doing nothing for him with the NFL Scouts:

“It doesn’t mean anything, honestly,” he said. “I just did it to do it. They’ll tell you they don’t really care that I got 23 reps on the bench. That doesn’t matter. They just want you to kick good.”

More from Daniel:

Other guys

More select quotes from the players can be found here.

Current standings in the GRT 2018 Bracket Contest

Whew, that was an exhausting weekend, both for the Vols and their fans, as well as for anyone who filled out a bracket.

Here are the standings in the Gameday on Rocky Top 2018 Bracket Tourney Pool after the first weekend:

 

Oof. There’s a whole lotta Tennessee in those finals columns, and you have to get a ways down the list to Harley and Chase to find someone with a viable champion. The way things are going, however, we’re going to have a Final Four of Loyola-Chicago, Florida State, West Virginia, and Syracuse, so everyone will be humbled in the end. Woo.

Whatever you do, don’t look at the path to the Final Four from the Vols’ old bracket. The top four seeds are all gone, and the five seed is a hated rival in blue who must contend only with, at best, a nine and a seven before the Elite Eight. And in that round, both the one and two seeds are already gone. Like I said, oof.