In his 11 years coaching in the college ranks prior to being hired as the Vols’ head coach, Jeremy Pruitt had never missed out on a bowl game. Whether it was serving as an assistant at Alabama or a defensive coordinator at Florida State, Georgia, and again at Alabama, Pruitt has never missed out on the postseason as a collegiate coach.
That is, until this year.
Tennessee lost 38-13 to Vanderbilt on Saturday, dashing any hopes of the Vols making it to a bowl game in Year One of the Jeremy Pruitt era. The Vols finished the season with a 5-7 record and fell short of earning a bowl berth for the second straight year.
For Tennessee, this year marks the sixth time in the last 11 seasons that the football program has failed to make a bowl game. That means they’ve missed out on a bowl game more than they’ve made it to one over the last 11 years.
But for Pruitt, this is a whole new experience.
“We just need to win a game. The extra practices, you’re obviously gonna get better if you do get to practice. But we gotta take what we got,” Pruitt said after Tennessee’s loss to Vanderbilt. “We have to go finish strong in the classroom and start our offseason conditioning. I don’t know, this is new for me.”
The Vols are going to miss out on the 15 extra practices they would get for qualifying for a bowl game. That’s huge for a program that needs to be rebuilt and needs a new culture installed.
Pruitt lamented that fact and pointed out that he and his team didn’t get the chance to experience a real spring practice session last spring either. Tennessee barely had enough healthy bodies to field a starting offensive line during the spring, and they only had two scholarship quarterbacks on the roster at that time.
For a team that needed rebuilt and needed competition, that was a huge detriment.
“Last spring, we did the best we could possibly do for spring practice,” Pruitt added. “It was about as far away from a real spring practice as you could possibly get. But they thought it was something. We got a long ways to go. We will have enough bodies this spring to have a real spring practice. That will make us better. We’ll have competition, we’ll have to fight.
“We had five O-lineman at one point in time this spring. It’s hard to go out there and run 22 bodies together because if you lose one of those guys, you don’t get another one.”
Pruitt has stressed competition over and over again during his first season as head coach, and he continued to drive home that point after Saturday’s game. The Vols didn’t have the depth at many positions this fall to afford any injuries, and in some cases Tennessee was stuck with who they had at certain positions.
“We don’t have competition at certain positions. So you’re either going to play somebody or you’re going to pay nobody, basically,” Pruitt stated. “We’ve got to recruit to where we can recruit some depth, to where we can get some competition. And when we do that, we’ll get better in a hurry.
“I think if a young man wants an opportunity to have a chance to play in the SEC really early, this would be a good place to start.”
Pruitt’s first year as a head coach likely taught him many lessons about college football. It brought him his first taste of real failure on the football field, and he’ll have to adjust to that this offseason as he and his staff hit the recruiting trail to try and bring in more depth and competition for Year Two.
