Vols Football: Ranking Butch Jones’ First Four Recruiting Classes

Tennessee Vols head coach Butch Jones will put the finishing touch on his fifth class at UT on Wednesday.

It’s been nearly four years since Butch Jones’ first signing class as the Vols’ head coach.

Which means, as is the custom on the internets, that it’s time to take a look at Jones’ success with his first four recruiting classes.

Typically a list like this is completely subjective. Unless, of course, you’re going to compare Jones’ recruiting classes to every other program’s in the nation over the same time period.

And that wouldn’t be fair, for obvious reasons.

So we figured that the best way to rank Jones’ first four classes was to rank them against themselves.

What we decided to do was to come up with an in-house ranking system.

We thought this would give us a good look at the contribution of the players signed in each class as a whole.

Basically each player in each class was assigned a point total. Points were awarded based on starts, games played, percentage of games started, All-SEC honors, etc.

Points were deducted from players that transferred or left the program for non-medical reasons.

This system obviously isn’t perfect, since the players in the 2016 class haven’t had the opportunity to contribute the way the players in other classes have. But it’s at least a solid indicator of what we can judge in the present.

To keep things as fair as possible, we didn’t average in the players in the 2016 class that redshirted this past season.

And in the spirt of transparency, here’s our point system.

• 25 points — Any player that started more than 40% of games in their career
• 15 points — Any player that started less than 40% of games in their career, but made at least one start
• 5 points — Any player that played at least one game in their career
• 0 points — Any player that never played a game in their career
• Subtract 10 points — Any player that transferred or quit the program
• Add 10 points — Any player that received All-SEC or freshman All-SEC honors (does not include pre season honors)

So let’s look at 2013 signee Jason Carr for example. He never started a game at Tennessee, but he did appear in a game. So he gets five points. But then he left the program, so it takes him to minus five points.

You get the picture. Let’s see how the classes stack up to each other.