From Brad Shepard on 247. Long but great read
He is a great defensive coordinator who has proven he is not a good head coach. He is not going to ever relinquish the play-calling duties on defense, and he is too immersed in everything to ever be a good CEO coach. There have been a couple of times this year where, in the postgame press conference, he mentioned "that was a bad play call by me."The scariest part to me is, despite his intimate involvement with the defense, it's still not very good. The secondary has failed to guard the middle of the field all season, and the defensive line has regressed since he took over. The pass rush is nonexistent. In the offseason, it was very obvious he sacrificed coaching prowess for recruiting ability, and where has it gotten us? To the point where the product on the field is so bad, the recruiting is being negatively affected. It's the most ridiculous thing you can do, and it's cost him.Those two things, to me, are the biggest indictments of the Pruitt coaching regime. The most glaring, however, is his mismanagement of the quarterback position, and that's why he's in such hot water. How many times have we seen mass coaching turnover as the final band-aid on a gaping wound? We see it every year. We saw it with Dooley. We saw it with Butch. We saw it with Herman last year. We saw it with Muschamp last year. It never helps. It's delaying the inevitable. I've seen the posts on "stopping the endless cycle," blah blah blah, but if you KNOW he isn't the answer, you have to pull the plug. At the very best, you keep Pruitt and demand he makes wholesale changes. Again, it never, ever works. Also, who can you realistically get who wants to board a sinking ship?For Tennessee to be in this position after an eight-win season is not OK. This is year 3. If he's still too stubborn to relinquish responsibilities at this point, there's no hope for him. If he's still flipping assistants every year, nobody wants to work for him and nobody works out, there's no hope for him. If you put your true freshman quarterback in game nine, and he's completely not ready because he's not really been developed and not had game reps because you've kept the least-clutch player in school history going out there every game, there's no hope for him. When college football these days is won with offense, and you have arguably one of the five most stagnant units in school history and I'm sitting in my living room predicting the play calls, there's no hope for him.Everybody has dealt with COVID-19. That's no excuse. Yes, it's going to cost a fortune, but if you keep Pruitt, how much more will it cost? People say the talent has been upgraded, but really has it? Where is the evidence of that? Do we look bigger? Stronger? Faster? Do we look like we're developing players? Are players getting that much better? On the other hand, when you bring in your own players and you're still playing Butch's players, what does that say about your confidence in the players you've brought in? The truth is, regardless of what the rankings say, Pruitt has not recruited that well. He still can't recruit kids from the state. He's thinking he's going to go to war with Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Clemson and get kids, and he doesn't. We continually lose out to them and settle.I could go on and on. The in-game coaching decisions are maddening. The lack of adjustments is inexplicable. The fact that we've gotten exponentially worse in the second half is a huge, glaring red light that should be blinking over and over again. I want to be wrong here, guys. But I'm not. We have to pull the plug. Moreover, there's a situation where you've got Hugh Freeze openly lobbying for the job, Billy Napier leaking to reporters he really wants the Tennessee job (he's a Tennessee boy), and the hottest coach in the country, Jamey Chadwell, hailing from East Tennessee and has a son named Heath who he named after Heath Shuler. You have to go make a few guys like Matt Campbell and some of the retired Whale Names tell you no (they will), but your FLOOR is three guys who would walk on broken glass to get here. Do we know they'd do a good job? No. There are no home runs, and that's scary. But we know the answer is not who is on the sideline right now for the Vols. How do you keep trotting out the same product on the field every week and think he's the answer? Fulmer's biggest mistake as a head coach was loyalty to his assistants. If he is the same way with Pruitt, we're just going to be dealing with this again next year when the candidate pool is perhaps not as strong.What do you guys think?
