The past 10 years of Tennessee football hasn’t been the most memorable. In fact, there are large parts of the last decade Vol fans would love to forget. But even arguably the worst decade of Tennessee football history has produced some top-tier talent, and some of the individual players over the last 10 years are worth remembering.
In this piece, I tried to narrow down a long list of players into the 10 best players to don the orange and white over the last 10 years. It wasn’t an easy task, and there are several deserving Vols who missed the cut. I could probably make a separate top 10 list of honorable mentions.
For example, Tyler Bray misses the cut here. Bray was an outstanding arm talent and is sprinkled across UT’s record books for his senior season in 2012, but he comes up short when compared to others on this list because of his ineffectiveness as a leader and his less-than-stellar performances in the more important games in his career. Yes, Bray tossed 500-plus yards against Troy, but he never really had standout performances against Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and the like.
If Bray is excluded from this list, that should tell you about the kind of talent Tennessee was still able to produce over the last decade.
Bray is just one example. I could list off half a dozen more, and then even more. This past decade was lean in terms of overall team success, but there were still some really, really good players who took the field for the Vols over the last 10 years.
Keep in mind, this list is just my opinion, and I’m sure people will disagree not only with who I chose to include, but also the order in which I put the 10 players on my list.
With that all in mind, here are my top 10 Vol football players of the past decade.
