Joel Klatt reveals why he's selling stock in Tennessee for 2025 season

Going into the 2025 season, FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt picked five teams he’s buying stock in and five teams he’s selling. Tennessee is the top team he’s selling.

Klatt explained his reasoning on The Joel Klatt Show, pointing out that Tennessee has some major turnover on offense and a lot of unknowns. Put that up against a difficult schedule and it’s easy to see how the Volunteers might come up short of some of the lofty marks they’ve set in recent years, including a College Football Playoff appearance last fall.

“If you look at this team winning 10 games a year ago, averaging over 10 wins over the last three seasons, Tennessee is a team that I could see take a step back,” Klatt said. “I know that, listen, I get it. People: ‘Tennessee is great.’ Eh, Tennessee is right now a sell team.”

The main issue that Klatt seemed to have with the Volunteers is the turnover at the quarterback position. The program lost Nico Iamaleava over a dispute regarding his NIL compensation, with Iamaleava transferring to UCLA this spring.

In comes Joey Aguilar, the Appalachian State quarterback who had initially transferred to UCLA himself. He joined the Tennessee program after Iamaleava took a spot with the Bruins.

“They’ve got the quarterback situation, which I don’t love,” Klatt said. “Losing a quarterback that late in the spring is not great. So you can make the argument like, ‘Well, we didn’t like Nico anyways.’ Fine. You know what, fine, that’s your prerogative. But the timing of that was not great because the way that they had to fill that in the transfer portal is in Joey Aguilar. So Aguilar comes in in the spring portal, which means he hasn’t had a lot of time with Josh Heupel in that system.

“Came to App State, but then spent a short time at UCLA, so UCLA and Tennessee kind of just trade quarterbacks. And this is a quarterback-centric system that puts a lot of pressure on the quarterback to make post-snap, downfield reads on wide receiver choice routes. That’s what the offense is. So that player is vital. Aguilar, by the way, led the country in interceptions last year with 14 when he was at App State. I think that’s a problem.”

Throw in the fact that Aguilar also loses a lot of help from last year’s squad and the situation becomes a little more dire. New players will have to emerge.

“They also have to replace the SEC Player of the Year, Dylan Sampson,” Klatt said. “Four starters off the offensive line. And the wide receiver group is young. So, again, step back.”

There is one group that Klatt feels good about for Tennessee. He explained.

“I think the defense should be fine. Should be fine,” he said. “Their best corner, Jermod McCoy is coming off that ACL injury that was suffered in January. I think that they should be OK.”

But finally, there’s the backdrop against which the team will be judged. Can Tennessee survive the gauntlet of SEC play? That’s no given.

“The schedule is reasonable based on SEC standards,” Klatt said. “I think they’re probably going to be like a 5-1 team going into Alabama in October. That would be projecting a September loss against Georgia. I think we’re all OK with that. But then they would have road games against ‘Bama, Florida… home game against Oklahoma. Not an easy schedule.

“It’s a conference that’s not going to give you any weeks off, as they love to tell us. But this is an easy team to sell for this year, again, based on where they’ve been and where they might be this year. Not a long-term thing. I do believe in Tennessee long-term, I just think that this season could be a difficult one, so they’re going to be a sell for me.”