College Football 2017: Winners, losers of Week 16 coaching carousel

Loser: Tennessee Volunteers

The Volunteers tire fire is finally over. There’s still a little smog hanging over Knoxville but they’re out of the spotlight and extinguished their mess with the hiring of Jeremy Pruitt.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Pruitt is a great coach and a winner. He’s proven that at Alabama and Florida State, and with the Crimson Tide again. The guy has national titles with multiple programs which is hard to accomplish. However, with all of the excitement and intrigue surrounding the firing of AD John Currie and the second coup that Phil Fulmer has pulled in Knoxville, they settled on a coordinator with no head coaching experience.

Pruitt is a 45-year-old coach from Alabama. He played football at Middle Tennessee from 1993-94, and then for the Crimson Tide from 1995-96. He then served as a graduate assistant at Alabama, before coaching at Plainview high school, then moving back to Alabama as a defensive backs coach before returning to Plainview high as a defensive coordinator.

Pruitt was then an assistant at Fort Payne High School before moving on to the infamous Hoover High in the Birmingham, Ala., area from 2004-06. I say infamous because Hoover was featured on MTV’s “Two a Days” reality show and head coach Rush Probst’s tawdry affair and second family.

In 2007, Pruitt returned to Tuscaloosa, Ala., as an assistant coach until 2012 before moving to the ACC and winning the national title with Florida State. He then returned to the SEC to be the defensive coordinator at Georgia from 2014-15. When Mark Richt was fired, the Crimson Tide brought him back as defensive coordinator where he lost the national title game in 2016, and now in 2017 has Alabama back in the College Football Playoff.

Pruitt will take over the Volunteers in a transitional time and this is a different type of first head coaching job. This isn’t Morris cutting his teeth off the grid at SMU, or Scott Frost down at UCF. This is major SEC football and is expected to fill a stadium of over 102,000 seats at Neyland in Knoxville.

I hope that Pruitt can overcome whatever coup Fulmer could possibly pull again, and is ready to take on the stress that comes with being a head coach, thrust onto the Paul Finebaum Show, and all of the appearances and press conferences that will come with the job. Kirby Smart was ready, but Jeremy Pruitt has to be comfortable with the spotlight heavily on the Vols’ tire fire.