Tennessee Volunteers coach excited as key player return after..
Football linebacker Darnell Wright of Tennessee is back; does he have any information?
The last straw for Tennessee football came last week when Henry To’o To’o, Eric Gray, and Quavaris Crouch all logged onto the transfer portal on the same day that Jeremy Pruitt was fired. It’s been a rough few months for the team. Two other events that occurred this past week were the transfers of Wanya Morris and Key Lawrence, who ended up joining the Oklahoma Sooners.
But all of those actions, excluding Lawrence’s transfer, happened prior to Danny White being appointed athletic director. Rocky Top has received a huge boost as a key offensive lineman has chosen to return to UT, just four days after that hire.
Tennessee football’s 2019 class five-star prospect Darnell Wright of West Virginia declared his intention to return in 2020. Wright shared a class with Morris, Couch, To’o To’o, and Gray. He shared the information on Twitter and Instagram.
The 6’6′′, 330-pound graduate of Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia, was expected to start almost all of the games at right tackle in 2019 and earn Freshman All-SEC recognition. But 2020 proved to be a difficult year for him and a lot of other people.
That might have made Wright’s transfer possible. So why would he decide to stay at this point? It would make sense if he made the announcement when Pruitt was still employed there, or if he did so either before or after Pruitt was fired.
However, Wright’s decision to stay after Pruitt was fired and White was hired suggests that he may know something about the coaching search that no one else does. Though the search has been unusually quiet, we do know that White had meetings with the players prior to starting the search.
Wright might therefore be enthusiastic about the program’s potential in his opinion. That might be somewhat offset by Lawrence’s exit, but remember that Lawrence made that choice on Friday and didn’t exhibit any flashes like Wright did. Few recruits arrived on campus during the Pruitt era with the same buzz that Wright did.
Wright’s return definitely helps to stem some of the bleeding in terms of football. It’s reasonable to argue that he hasn’t yet reached his full potential, but he didn’t enroll early in 2019 and COVID made everything shorter for everyone in 2020, so he hasn’t had enough time off to fully learn any system at this level just yet. He is more resilient because he did participate in all ten games in 2020.
Wright can contribute to maintaining stability on the outside, especially with the departure of Morris and the losses of Trey Smith and probably Brandon Kennedy. The return of Cade Mays provides the new head coach with some immediate leverage. Cooper Mays, Jerome Carvin, and K’Rojhn Calbert are probably coming back as well.
In short, Tennessee football is going to benefit greatly from Wright’s decision to return in a number of ways. It will just give any new coach a little bit more to work with next year, but it could also be a sign that a quality hire is actually coming to the program.
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