Tennessee Football Depth by Class 2024

Here’s the updated Tennessee football depth chart by class for 2024. Some explanation is below the pic.

Some FAQs:

• What is this? Originally, this was a way to track where the team needed to focus recruiting efforts by seeing where future weaknesses might be. If you saw that, for example, the entire offensive line was aging out, and your coaching staff wasn’t recruiting offensive linemen **coughDerekDooleycough** then you’d know there was a problem a comin’.

• What do the stars mean? Players with a composite 4-star recruiting ranking or higher have a full star, high-3 star composite players have a half star, below that have an empty star, unranked players are NR. This is based on the idea of the blue chip ratio—no team has won a national championship in the last decade without at least half of its recruits being 4 & 5-star players. This is just a way to help visualize that, although this graph also includes walk-ons that wouldn’t count in that equation anyway.

• Doesn’t the transfer portal make this kinda useless? I wrestled with this question a little bit in deciding if this project was worth continuing at all. Obviously, holes in the depth chart can be filled with the portal now, and holes will open unexpectedly when players jump in the portal. I still feel like this is a good snapshot of the health of the current roster, and I think you can draw some conclusions about players who do enter the portal from it. For example, Elijah Herring was still on the roster when I put this together, but has since entered the transfer portal. You can see why Herring, despite leading the Vols in tackles a year ago, might have made that decision—there’s a bottleneck of talent at that position and some highly-ranked players waiting in the wings.

• You messed up (player name/position/rating/etc.). That’s not a question, but yeah, probably. I used the current roster on utsports.com to make this, but it’s entirely likely that I mistyped or misread something. I also made some judgement calls on projected starters and used ourlads.com as a tiebreaker when I couldn’t decide, though I don’t know if that’s any better than guessing. There’s also problems like trying to figure if a guy is going to be used as an interior offensive lineman or offensive tackle, etc. I like to make those kind of distinctions, but it’s not always going to be perfect. Your suggestions for improvement in the comments below are appreciated.