KNOXVILLE — Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt met with media Thursday to discuss the Vols’ scrimmage that took place Wednesday night.
“We went back to Neyland last night and had somewhat of a scrimmage, got to get in probably somewhere around 40 to 44 plays in situational football,” Pruitt said on a Zoom call with reporters.
“It was good to do,” Pruitt continued. “It was pretty sloppy, to be honest. Lots of penalties, especially on the offensive side – false starts, which just goes back to team take off, not having some guys in there being consistent with cadence.”
Offensively, the third-year Tennessee head coach mentioned that the Vols “put the ball on the ground a few times.”
Defensively, Pruitt said “missed tackles” were a part of the scrimmage.
“We have a whole lot of things that we really need to improve on over the next two weeks and we’ve got to work hard to do that,” Pruitt said ahead of Tennessee’s first game at South Carolina on Sept. 26.
Pruitt discussed how Tennessee will approach the next two weeks in preparation to kick off the 2020 season.
“I would suspect that our plan will obviously change a little bit as we move closer to the game,” he said. “I don’t feel like we have the luxury of just strictly doing like an in-season practice, probably for the first couple of weeks. We really need to kind of stay in camp form and focus on fundamentals. We have some experience at some positions, but yet at others we have lots of inexperience. We’ve got to create some consistency, some chemistry in all three phases.
“There definitely has been some bright spots with some guys that we didn’t know a whole lot about and those guys have got to continue to gain knowledge of the position that they play, which will give them a chance to contribute this year. As we get some of these guys back, we really need to focus on special teams. It’s probably been the biggest battle for us over the last 10 to 14 days, is kind of creating the same unit out there on special teams and kind of taking the next steps.”