Tony Vitello makes honest admission about the 2025 Tennessee baseball team and suggests the problem has been fixed for the 2026 Vols
The 2025 Vols baseball team was unable to replicate the same success as the 2024 Tennessee squad that brought home a national championship. Tony Vitello, however, knows what the problem was.
The Tennessee Vols had a good baseball team in 2025.
It wasn’t as good as the team the Vols had in 2024 when the program won the College World Series, but it was still a good team.
Tennessee went 46-19 in 2025. The Vols hosted the Knoxville Regional (which they won) before seeing their season end in the Fayetteville Super Regional in just two games.
Recent history hasn’t been kind to teams the year after winning a national championship, but the Vols still managed to put together a solid season — despite coming up short in the end.
But as many fans know, once a program wins a national championship, that becomes the expectation every season (even if that’s not a realistic expectation — especially in a sport as unpredictable as baseball).
So while the Volunteers had a good season last year, the end result still felt like a bit of a letdown.
Vols coach Tony Vitello makes admission about the 2025 Tennessee baseball team and suggests the problem has been fixed for the 2026 season
Tennessee had plenty of talent last season, but they just never put it all together for whatever reason. We saw flashes of greatness from the Vols in 2025, but the consistency just wasn’t there.
Vitello said during an appearance this week on The Mike Keith Show that last year’s team was “lacking some of the pieces of the puzzle”. He also pointed out that he thinks this year’s team seems to have a lot of the right pieces.
“I just met with one of our team’s leaders and he felt like the locker room is in a really good place,” said Vitello. “It’s always great when the leaders will share some things that are going on. There’s always going to need to be adjustments or maybe one-on-one conversations with guys to give them a little better perspective….There’s a lot of different pieces to the team. Last year we were very top heavy. I do think we were lacking in some of the pieces of the puzzle and this group seems to have a lot of them.”
Vitello suggested late last season that the 2025 Vols weren’t quite as fiery as some of his past teams.
“I think our guys (in 2025), we had to figure out what makes them go,” said Vitello last May. “But they’ve also kind of had to sort through that a little bit, too. We had fireworks with the Vanderbilt game, and I think, this is my perspective, both teams were equally guilty of that. It was just the nature of a very competitive series here in Knoxville. And I don’t know if this was the case for our guys, but I don’t think they do very well with the whole, ‘Let’s go out and kill these guys and let’s go out and dominate’. It’s better when they’re more relaxed and they just go out and play and keep it simple.”
“And we’ve tried to point that out to them,” continued Vitello. “But by this time of year, it is up to those leaders, and I do think we have some positive leadership. If anything, this group has been a fun group to come to work with every day. And the team chemistry has been there, and it’s gotten better and better each day. As opposed to with some teams, the more you spend time around each other, it’s like a relationship, which I don’t know much about that, but sometimes the more you spend time around somebody, the more you want to strangle them. This group has kind of gone the other way. It’s been fun to be around each other every day.”
As a result of the way last season ended, and because the team was missing certain “pieces of the puzzle”, Vitello vowed to be more aggressive in the portal during the offseason.
“We’re probably going to be more aggressive in the portal than we’ve ever been,” said Vitello in June. “I think one thing that people don’t realize is, you know, they complain we lose to this team or that team on a Sunday. Well, this team, or that team, loaded up on a lot more portal guys.”
Vitello delivered on the promise by landing the No. 6 transfer class in the nation (according to D1Baseball.com).
It sounds like Vitello is confident that the 2026 Vols have what the 2025 Vols were missing. We’ll see if that’s indeed the case in a little over four months when the 2026 season gets underway.
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