There are only a small handful of athletic directors in the SEC who coached football before becoming AD. But Tennessee is unique in that their Athletics Director not only coached football, but he did so with the Vols. And he did it at a high level.
Phillip Fulmer was Tennessee’s head coach for 17 seasons, and he served as an assistant on Johnny Majors’ staff for over a decade before that too. He won two SEC titles and a national championship as head coach with the Vols, and his 152 wins are second only to General Robert Neyland in Tennessee history.
Fulmer believes that his time spent as Tennessee’s head coach gives him an advantage over other athletic directors not only in the SEC, but across the country as well.
“I know what a practice is supposed to look like, I know how teams can be affected by injuries,” Fulmer told reporters on Thursday. “I know what an excuse is and a reason is. I don’t have to just look at a win/loss record to know if we’re making progress or not. And that’s not just in football. I played a lot of baseball and basketball. I’ve been around.
“I can tell if kids are competing or not at the level they should be. And if they’re not at the level they should be or aren’t good enough, then why are they here? I think I got an advantage.”
For Fulmer, his experience as a head coach and as an assistant will help him aid new Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt as he guides the Vols’ football program.
“I’ve been there, done a lot of things,” Fulmer stated. “I’ve been a recruiting coordinator, so I know what that’s supposed to look like. I lined the fields at Wichita State, painted the weight room. You work yourself up, and there’s an attitude you have about being successful.
“There’s a few ways to do that, and I know being a ‘grinder’ is one way. That’s what (Pruitt) is, and that’s what I was.”
Fulmer has done just about everything a coach can do in collegiate football. And Pruitt has taken a similar path to his first head coaching job in college.
Pruitt got his start as a graduate assistant at Alabama in 1997, then he worked his way up the ranks in high school, going from defensive backs coach to defensive coordinator. He parlayed that into a defensive assistant role with Alabama in 2007, and he was eventually named Bama’s defensive backs coach in 2010. He left Alabama prior to the 2013 season to become Florida State’s defensive coordinator, served the same position at Georgia from 2014-15, then returned to Alabama in 2016 to be the Tide’s defensive coordinator.
Now he’s Tennessee’s head coach. And Fulmer fully intends to help him integrate into the Big Orange culture as much as he can.
“I think I can be a help to him in all those ways,” Fulmer said of his experiences paying off for Pruitt. “He’s open to knowing about our history, and I’ve gotta tell him about it. You know, the game maxims, the traditions, and all those things that’s important to our Tennessee people, the guts of what we do.
“He does a good job with the media. I told him to do what you can, but the priority is with your football team. We all want to be back in the championship picture, that’s our goal.”
It’s been over a decade since the Vols even had a chance to win the SEC Championship, let alone the National Championship. The climb back to that level will be a long road, but Fulmer is confident he made the right choice in Pruitt to help get Tennessee back there.
And Fulmer believes he has a special advantage over other athletic directors, and he plans to use that to help Pruitt and the football team as much as he can.
