KNOXVILLE — The 2020 college football season is nearing 100 days until kickoff.
Tennessee will kickoff Jeremy Pruitt’s third season as the Vols’ head coach Sept. 5 against Charlotte at Neyland Stadium.
Pruitt recently joined “SEC This Morning” to discuss a wide-range of topics including his time as an assistant at Hoover High School (2004-06) under then-head coach Rush Propst.
“The league that we played in was very well coached, and a lot of the guys that we coached against are coaching in college,” Pruitt said. “Some of the guys that I coached with or coached against, whether it’s Bill Clark at UAB, John Grass at Jacksonville State, or Chip Lindsey at Troy, Matt Moore is at West Virginia — he was our offensive coordinator at Hoover. So it’s interesting ten years later, it’s almost like the game that we started coaching in college is what we we were coaching back then.
“I know from a defensive perspective, looking at the offenses, with the way the game has kind of become, a lot of loose plays, and it’s on the perimeter with a lot of RPOs. This was things that we were seeing everyday in practice, so lots of things that I am seeing right now across college football. I think at Iowa State — they play with three-high safety looks — and I see other teams doing this. It was things that I saw back in the early 2000s. So it’s interesting how the game kind of evolves and comes back around, and I’m sure it will continue to do that.”
On “SEC This Morning,” host Peter Burns also asked Pruitt about Propst recently discussing how the third-year Tennessee head coach does well against offenses like Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley.
“He runs the same type of offense that I run, he has always been creative, but I just feel like that game sits where Jeremy is at his best. That is where I think Jeremy is at his best, is in that kind of game.” — Rush Propst said of Tennessee playing at Oklahoma in Week 2.
“Going back to those days, we played against a fast-paced offense every single day,” Pruitt told Burns. “I’m not really comparing that to what Lincoln does, but I do think that in the way that we structured in how we call things, I think we really adapted probably faster — maybe than some other teams in how to deal with fast-paced offenses.
“Just from a call-system, making it one word, we had to do that going back to when I was coaching at Hoover. We could be very, very multiple and run everything that we wanted to within our system, but it was all one word calls. They managed to do it on offense, you got to manage to do it on defense. I felt like from a structural standpoint, we have been able to do that.”