Josh Heupel just celebrated his 5 year anniversary of being hired at Tennessee and Jeremy Pruitt is still impacting the Vols
It’s been a half decade since the Tennessee Vols fired Jeremy Pruitt and he’s still having an impact on the program.
This week marked the five year anniversary of the Tennessee Vols hiring Josh Heupel as the program’s head coach.
Heupel was hired by the Vols in early 2021 after Tennessee fired Jeremy Pruitt in the midst of a major recruiting scandal.
That scandal, unbelievably, is still impacting the Vols five years later — despite the fact that many of college football’s top players are now legally getting paid millions of dollars a year to play.
How Jeremy Pruitt is still impacting the Tennessee Vols
VolQuest’s Austin Price joined WNML’s Josh and Swain on Wednesday and he detailed the ways the Pruitt era is still impacting Tennessee.
“Tennessee had a junior day two weeks ago,” explained Price. “Last weekend, they were scheduled to have a junior day, but because of the ice and snow, they weren’t able to do that. And they were not able to just switch weekends and do it this coming weekend because they did have a portal visitor still on campus last Saturday. And due to the Jeremy Pruitt penalties, they have to have seven consecutive days in December or January where they don’t have players on campus. And that’s really hard to do with the portal and everything else going on. So they’re currently in that seven day window for that, so the next junior day and recruits on campus will be in March.”
“They’re obviously under the scholarship reduction,” continued Price when asked to further detail the Pruitt penalties the Vols are still dealing with. “They have at least one game a year — one home game a year in league play — where they have to take no recruits (for visits). So Vanderbilt has been that game the last few times that Vanderbilt has been to town. That’s how it was back in November. Tennessee did not have any unofficial visitors here for that weekend. Now, they could have official visitors, they just couldn’t have unofficial visitors.
“And then there are periodic other times where Tennessee can’t make recruiting calls. So they can’t call a recruit or a commit or whatever for seven days during (certain) periods. And then in that, they can’t have a certain number of official visitors — less than other schools. There’s several things that they’ve had to deal with and will have to deal with up until 2028. Now, Jeremy Pruitt had that Alabama judge grant him the ability to coach — if somebody were to be willing to hire him. And I guess in my mind, Tennessee should be actively trying to figure out a way to get out of having to pay the piper on this. If he’s technically eligible to coach, Tennessee should be technically eligible to be back at full strength and not having to have any of these restrictions. That’s my stance on that.”
I think most folks would agree with Price that Tennessee shouldn’t still be facing recruiting penalties considering Pruitt can now coach, and also considering that some players are, again, legally getting paid millions.
When you think about the restrictions that Heupel and his staff have had to deal with over the last five years, it makes it even more impressive what Tennessee’s accomplished in those five years.
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