KNOXVILLE - When Kendal Vickers lines up at defensive tackle for Tennessee on Saturday against Vanderbilt, it will be his 39th consecutive and final start as a Volunteer.
Amid a crushing series of injuries around him, the redshirt senior has managed to be a stabilizing force on Tennessee's roster over the past three seasons.
How did he do it?
"If I had an answer, I'd tell everybody else that's gotten hurt," Vickers said this week. "I don't know."
Kendal Vickers (39) looks to the Tennessee bench. The top-ranked University of Alabama Crimson Tide visited the University of Tennessee Volunteers in SEC football action on October 15, 2016Vickers entered Tennessee as a late addition to Butch Jones' first recruiting class. He was not highly recruited and spent his first season as a redshirt. Vickers appeared in five games in 2014 but did not record a tackle until his streak of starts began in Tennessee's 2015 season opener.
Since then, he's established himself as the team's pre-eminent leader. Vickers is the only player who has served as a captain in every game this season, and presumably he will carry that honor one last time when the Vols host the Commodores at Neyland Stadium to close the season.
"It means a lot," Vickers said, "especially from the guys in the locker room I talk to every day and the coaches that they respect the way I handle things, the way I play, the way I come out every day to get ready to work and try and help this team win games. It means a lot."
Vickers said this week that he tore the MCL in one of his knees against Georgia in 2015. Tennessee had a bye the following week and Vickers started in the next game against Alabama, playing through the injury.
That was the closest he came to missing a game during his streak of starts that has included plenty of minor injuries that required hours spent in the training room, which is a place Vickers admitted that he does not like.
"Kendal, I would say, is one of the warriors of our defense," junior safety Micah Abernathy said Tuesday. "He tries to play through whatever is going on, on or off the field. He's somebody that I'm going to miss playing with."
Abernathy described Vickers as "that type of guy you're going to miss in the program."
"You know it's coming from a good place when Kendal corrects you," Abernathy said. "He's someone that I go to as well for leadership."
The 2017 season hasn't gone the way Vickers wanted it to go, but he said he developed memories at Tennessee that he'll never forget.
"I feel like it's gone by pretty fast," he said. "You know, when you get here you think it's never going to end, and here we are today and it's about to end. I think it went pretty fast.
Contact David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com.