The Tennessee football program looks to rebuild under Jeremy Pruitt. The Vols had a tumultuous off-season but now must look to the future.
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Tennessee football program has fallen on hard times. The Volunteers finished the 2017 season with a 4-8 record (0-8 in the SEC) and head coach Butch Jones was given his pink slip before the year even ended. Interim head coach Brady Hoke took over and lost both games while he was at the helm.
Knoxville expects more from a once proud football program that had the last double-digit winning season in 2007. The Vols have posted a losing record in six of the past ten seasons under six different coaches (counting two interim coaches). Lane Kiffin saw USC as a better job and bolted after a 7-6 season but Mike Leach and Mike Gundy saw it as a step up from their current positions at Washington State and Oklahoma State, respectively.
With the tumultuous off-season hunt for a new football coach behind them, the Vols are looking to return to glory under Jeremy Pruitt. Coach Pruitt is a former Alabama Crimson Tide defensive back, graduate assistant, and defensive coordinator. Pruitt has taken a different route to being a college head coach as a former defensive coordinator at Hoover High School under Rush Probst, before a return to the college level having won national championships under Jimbo Fisher and Nick Saban and working for Mark Richt while at Georgia.
Pruitt’s defensive-minded approach will create a mini-Bama in Knoxville and that may not be a bad thing. The Knoxville-Memphis-Nashville areas produce really good high school football talent and the Vols should run the state and surrounding areas. But in order to please boosters and fans in a win-now era of football, Pruitt needs to reload not rebuild as Tennessee finished the 2017 season ranked 107th overall per the S&P+.