The new guy is a glue guy.
Dont’e Thornton continues to immerse himself into Tennessee’s football program after spending his first two seasons at Oregon. The 6-foot-5, 214-pound junior receiver enrolled in January and has displayed enough strengths to show he can join Ramel Keyton, Bru McCoy and Squirrel White to form the nucleus of a position group that could successfully move on from Jalen Hyatt and Cedric Tillman in Josh Heupel’s offense.
“With Dont’e, what you’ve got is a big-targeted receiver, a guy who can run, and a guy who can bend and is agile,” receivers coach Kelsey Pope said Wednesday in a news conference. “It’s a completely different product from what we had last year in Jalen and Ced. He’s kind of a mixture of both of those guys in some ways.
“There have been a bunch of times this camp when your eyes just get big, and maybe I’ll look at Heup or he looks at me. He’s a good addition.”
The Volunteers held their seventh preseason practice Wednesday and are scheduled to scrimmage Thursday morning inside Neyland Stadium.