Guard Freddie Dilione, a redshirt freshman from Tennessee, is putting his name into the transfer portal, according to Rob Lewis of On3. He represents the Vols’ first offseason transfer portal loss to date.
Dilione was a member of the recruiting class of 2022 initially, but soon after he signed a contract with the Vols in November 2022, news broke that the No. 1-ranked player in North Carolina and a consensus top-50 prospect will enroll in January 2023 while taking a redshirt year.
Despite being a highly-regarded recruit, Dilione and his family made the decision to enroll mid-year, just like Santiago Vescovi did when he arrived at UT, and it’s likely that everyone involved agreed on the redshirt component of the puzzle.
Freddie decided he wanted to get here as early as he could,” Vols’ Head Coach Rick Barnes said, via On3’s report at the time. “We’ll get him here and we’ll get him, I don’t know how long it will really take him to get to practice with us, but we’ll get him going in school, get him going that way.”
After spending the second half of the 2022-2023 season with the team without the pressure of having to be immediately college ready, Dilione had a good summer leading into this past year. He had opportunities in Tennessee’s three-game exhibition trip overseas and in his time with the 2023 USA Basketball Men’s under-19 World Cup Team training camp. During the three-games in three-days stretch in Italy, he averaged 11 points and nearly 5.5 assists points per-game against Lithuania’s under-21 team, which the Vols played twice, and Stella Azzurra, an amateur Italian basketball squad from Rome.
he averaged 11 points and nearly 5.5 assists points per-game against Lithuania’s under-21 team, which the Vols played twice, and Stella Azzurra, an amateur Italian basketball squad from Rome.
Standing 6 feet 5 inches tall and 195 pounds, Dilione showed promise as an all-around player who could play both on and off the court and provide the Vols with a backup option behind point guard Zakai Zeigler. In the match against the Lithuanian team, he made several plays, slithered through the defense, and had some good long-range shooting.
Dilione made it through every cut until the last round, when he was one of two players removed from the team to bring the roster down to its 12-man cap. Only 35 players were accepted to the U19 World Cup training camp.
However, Dilione never seemed to settle into his routine following a seemingly promising summer. In Tennessee’s third game of the season on November 14, 23, he sustained a partially torn plantar fascia. He did not play again until the Vols’ game against George Mason on December 5, 23. Therefore, the majority of his opportunity to settle into a rhythm during his extended playing time was taken away while Zakai Zeigler was still getting back to normal following his early-season ACL injury. Who knows how Dilione’s year was affected by the circumstance.
For context, Dilione wasn’t the only younger player to receive insufficient playing time; Cam Carr, D.J., Jefferson, Cade Phillips, and JP Estrella Phillips also failed to accumulate more than 100 total playing minutes.
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