KNOXVILLE — On the eve of the start of his third spring practice as Tennessee’s football coach, Butch Jones can say with confidence that his program is progressing on schedule.
The Volunteers are returning nearly all of their starters and contributors from a young team that last season went 7-6 and notched Tennessee’s first postseason win since 2007, and the talent level is higher thanks to a pair of touted signing classes.
There’s just one problem.
Or, well, roughly a dozen of them, to be a little more precise.
In Jones’s third spring, Tennessee will be handcuffed by a handful of absences, many of them generated by players continuing to recover from offseason surgeries to fix what ailed them during the 2014 season.