High school recruiting is the bread and butter, but it is not the only way that creative college coaches build a roster. Hitting the JuCo ranks can be just as important for a winning season, especially if you can pick the best players from community colleges to strengthen a position that would otherwise be a little shaky.
By Steve Wright
It also helps when you are able to recruit a player like Tiyon Evans out of Hutchinson (Hutchinson, KS) Community College, who is ranked by the 247Sports Composite as the No. 3 JuCo player in the class, the No. 1 running back, and the No. 1 player in a state that has produced some JuCo stars at the four-year level over the years.
Evans – weirdly – is actually recommitting to the Vols. It was a little more than two months ago when he originally decided that the Vols might not be for him, reopening his recruitment to explore other options. At that point he had been committed to the Vols for over five months and the lure of Knoxville proved to be too much in the end as he chose to commit to Tennessee for the second time ahead of interest from Missouri and Oklahoma among others.
Evans is going to be arriving in Knoxville in January too – a bonus on getting him to settle into the offense over the spring period. He chose this ahead of staying at Hutch for another semester, one where football should be played after the JuCo season was postponed from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2021 due to Covid-19.
Evans brings both experience and talent to the Vols roster. He has the frame of a power back and given that he will two years removed from high school when he suits up for Tennessee he is already filled out at a solid 225 pounds. He is a dynamic return guy too, one able to use his running back vision and feet to find a hole and explode through it on his way to a big play. There are options with how to use Evans and that makes him a big recruit of Jeremy Pruitt and his staff.
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