Jeremy Pruitt earned the first win of his head coaching career on Saturday inside Neyland Stadium by leading Tennessee to a 59 to 3 win over ETSU. Much like the opening weekend of the season, the Volunteers started the game off slow, but unlike the opener, Pruitt’s squad responded after the game was delayed due to weather.

Here are the highlights of what Pruitt had to say after the ETSU game:

“We feel better than we did last week. We didn’t make mental errors on offense, we went to the right folks we had success. You have to give ETSU credit, they gave us a lot of different looks, they played hard… I think we in the first quarter we had minus-eight yards rushing… Defensively, we had two turnovers and scored once, set the offense up on the other. Marquill Osborne blocked a punt, there’s 21 points right there just from really non-offensive touchdowns. That’s good. We need to be opportunistic like that… We didn’t have a turnover, that’s two weeks in a row — we need to keep that going.”

  • Didn’t like the performance of the second-team unit.
  • The more chances we get, to get the second-team in, they’ll have a chance to have success.
  • A lot of positives in this game, still have a lot to learn and I hope we learn from these and improve.
  • I think last week was a good lesson for the players… I don’t think we did much differently… Our strength staff tried to bring more juice when we came out… Everything is new for our guys. We went up 45 points, that’s new for them… There’s lessons to be learned in everything we do.

on freshman corner Bryce Thompson

  • He didn’t play well last week, he’ll tell you that. Some of that is on him, some of that is on errors. The one thing he did on Monday, he came back and he competed.