If we’re to consider the allegations levied by the NCAA, then Jeremy Pruitt’s transgressions at Tennessee embrace paying an athlete’s mom’s medical invoice and funneling cash to gamers to help with residing bills.
How wonderful the road is between Good Samaritan and flagrant dishonest.
For Pruitt’s alleged actions and people of employees members he oversaw, the NCAA has steered that the previous Vols coach might obtain a show-cause penalty on the conclusion of a case that has dragged on for greater than two years.
I’m unsympathetic to Pruitt’s Tennessee destiny. The NCAA’s findings level to a coach and a employees that sloppily flouted guidelines governing impermissible advantages. Coaches who lose too usually whereas coloring outdoors the traces do not final lengthy. Pruitt’s contract provisions, mixed along with his actions and failure to watch his employees, gave Tennessee ample ammunition to fireplace a floundering coach for trigger and with out buyout.
And but, Pruitt stays stationed in one thing of a school football purgatory whereas this NCAA case proceeds at glacial pace. Wednesday marked the two-year anniversary of Pruitt’s firing, and he hasn’t labored for a university program since then. In the meantime, NCAA guidelines advanced to permit athletes to revenue off boosters, collectives and firms for use of their title, picture and likeness.
While NCAA guidelines evolution doesn’t excuse all previous shenanigans, it appears foolish that Pruitt, 48, stays handcuffed in perpetuity whereas the school athletics panorama doesn’t replicate the one in place throughout Pruitt’s tenure.
And so, if Nick Saban wants Pruitt to renew his position as Alabama’s defensive coordinator or as another defensive teaching aide, then he should make the hire.
Sanctions haven’t been issued within the Tennessee case. As it stands, the NCAA’s show-cause language in direction of Pruitt solely hints at attainable penalties to come back.
Plus, whereas a show-cause ruling hamstrings the affected coach and should create job limitations (similar to recruiting restrictions), a show-cause penalty doesn’t prohibit a college from using that coach. Auburn employed basketball coach Bruce Pearl whereas he had an lively present trigger.
In different phrases, the show-cause language within the NCAA’s discover of allegations is just not an insurmountable impediment.
And, anyway, how’s this for trigger, should Alabama want to hire Pruitt and argue sanctions he’ll seemingly face: Paying an athlete’s father or mother’s medical payments hardly appears so scandalous when considered by means of the lens of school-associated collectives waging bidding wars for youngsters.
If your solely publicity to Pruitt had been his Tennessee tenure, you may surprise why so many Alabama followers contemplate him the best selection for Saban’s defensive coordinator emptiness. Pruitt ranks among the many worst Tennessee coaches in program historical past, and Alabama acquired an up-close take a look at his futility. The Crimson Tide beat Pruitt’s Vols by a mixed rating of 141-51 in three matchups.
Pruitt’s tenure appears worse primarily based on what got here subsequent.
After flicking off the scab of the Pruitt period, the Vols are 18-8 after two seasons below Josh Heupel. They beat Alabama final season for the primary time since 2006.
But one college’s trash turns into one other’s coordinator, and whereas Pruitt proved an unfit football CEO, Saban has by no means employed a extra achieved coordinator.
Alabama touted the nation’s finest protection in back-to-back seasons with Pruitt as coordinator. His 2017 crew gained the nationwide championship earlier than Pruitt left for Tennessee.
Alabama has not ranked higher than ninth nationally in scoring protection in any of the 5 seasons for the reason that departure of Pruitt, whom some Vols followers got here to know as “Gump” after his tenure soured.
Surely Pruitt is just not the one coach who might succeed working Alabama’s protection. Kirby Smart thrived within the position for years. Former Wisconsin defensive coordinator and one-time Badgers interim coach Jim Leonhard appears certified for the job. If Saban likes another person for the job, then possibly tapping Pruitt as a defensive analyst is probably the most applicable segue out of purgatory whereas the NCAA case inches alongside.
But few can match Pruitt’s coordinator résumé. He oversaw sturdy defenses at Florida State and Georgia earlier than reuniting with Alabama, the place he began his faculty profession as a member of Saban’s inaugural employees in 2007.
If Pruitt had been to rejoin Saban’s employees, he wouldn’t oversee both this system or its recruiting operation. And he’d obtain higher management than he skilled at Tennessee.
One dialog with the unrefined Pruitt should have been sufficient to inform Tennessee’s brass he’d want regular oversight and help as a first-time coach steering an operation as large as an SEC program. Instead, Tennessee’s compliance division snoozed, and Pruitt’s boss, then-Vols athletics director Phillip Fulmer, apparently was so clueless that he had no data of Pruitt’s employees’s clandestine rule-breaking, regardless of Fulmer’s close to omnipresence across the program.
Tennessee’s insufficient management throughout Pruitt’s tenure prolonged past the coach’s desk, and as soon as UT’s administration lastly caught on, it swept its athletics management into the dustbin for an efficient reboot.
It’s not as if Pruitt re-entering faculty football would equal skating previous punishment.
While the NCAA’s gears of justice laboriously churned, Pruitt misplaced his job, and he acquired not one of the $12.6 million buyout he would have been due had he not been fired with trigger. The findings of the NCAA and Tennessee joint investigation tarnished Pruitt’s popularity, which he’d already broken with the Vols’ on-field efficiency, to the extent that he’ll in all probability by no means once more be a Division I head coach. Pruitt didn’t coach wherever final season after spending 2021 within the NFL.
Pruitt reaped what he sowed, however the flogging he acquired should be adequate inside an business during which a coach calling escort companies along with his university-provided cellphone is just not a career-ending mistake.
Pruitt, an Alabama native and UA alumnus, lately touted his Bama bona fides.
“Make no mistake,” Pruitt advised DawgNation earlier this month, “I’m an Alabama man.”
Tennessee’s mistake hire might grow to be Alabama’s resolution.
If Saban wants to make that occur, he should not let NCAA bluster from a bygone period stand in his approach.
Blake Toppmeyer is an SEC Columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and observe him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.
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