Tennessee head coach Butch Jones awarded his senior class with a life championship after it went 4-4 in SEC play, including a loss to Vanderbilt.
Coming off the team's first national championship since 1998, the Volunteers wrapped up the nation's No. 17 recruiting class Wednesday. That's not elite, but it's nothing to sneeze at, either.
In Jones' mind, however, he finished No. 1 with an unprecedented 23 five-star athletes. Why? Because of a specific algorithm developed by the Vols' recruiting staff.
From 247sports.com:
“We’ve spoken about the competitive nature, and I think that’s really, really big in today’s world,” Jones said. Everyone gets into the whole two-star, three-star, four-star, five-star thing. The only five-star that we even concern ourselves with is a five-star heart.
“We want five-star hearts and five-star competitors.”
The pulsating hearts of his team should give Tennessee a decided schematic advantage on Sept. 4th when his team heads to Atlanta for an SEC-ACC showdown against Georgia Tech.
