Has Jeremy Pruitt done enough to return to Tennessee next season?
Vol Nation appears to be split on that question after Pruitt’s latest team finished the season with a 3-7 record after losing to Texas A&M 34-13 in the regular season finale.
After the game, during his postgame press conference, Pruitt was asked if he expected to return to Tennessee in 2021.
“Yeah, I think absolutely,” Pruitt answered. “You look over the first two years we were here, where we were at when we got here. I’ve said it before, from personnel, culture, what we’re building. And I get it, 3-7 is not where we want to be right? But there’s one thing that I can say, I can lay my head down on my pillow every night and know that I’ve done everything that I could possibly do to make sure that we protected everybody in our program.
“We’re looking for a competitive edge. There’s lots of things that we didn’t know about (regarding COVID), if we were going to have a COVID season again, I probably would be a little more prepared to handle it. But I get the business, I understand.
“I look at our football team we’ve got a lot of really young players on our team. Most of our team will be back. I think it’s a very good indication of how they compete every week. These guys don’t quit. They believe in what we’re doing, and they understand that we’re not that far away.
“A lot of these guys I think they choose to be a part of the solution, not the problem. If you look at our team last year, we won, I guess, seven out of our last eight games. We barely won most of those games. With exception of UAB, all of them were a one-possession game. And a lot of the guys on our team were part of that.
“So they understand that there’s not much difference in this league, our margin of error is very small, and we know that as a staff so we’re, we’re working hard to improve it.”
A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Michael Wayne Bratton oversees the news coverage for Saturday Down South. Michael previously worked for FOX Sports and NFL.com
