Gameday on Rocky Top

Football is near.

And it won’t be long until we’re gearing ourselves up for the Vols to usher in the Jeremy Pruitt era.

We all know 2018 likely isn’t going to be a pretty sight, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk ourselves into the Vols being much-improved under the former Alabama defensive coordinator. After all, Butch Jones is gone.

You just can’t help this time of year to be a tiny bit optimistic, even if logic (and recent history) suggests this is going to be yet another rebuilding campaign in Knoxville. Pruitt wants to win now, and he definitely isn’t used to losing after successful tenures in Tuscaloosa, Tallahassee and Athens, Georgia.

He’s outfitted UT’s roster with more size, and an infusion of collegiate talent. And he’s won some recruiting battles for guys who must be able to come right in and make an impact.

But what about the dudes already on the team? Who needs to make a major step forward in 2018 for the Vols to rise above the 4-8 doldrums of a historically horrible season where it looked like the team quit on former coach Butch Jones and his staff?

Let’s take a look at our latest installment.

OFFENSE

No. 3 Ty Chandler, Sophomore Running Back

New Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt likes big backs. Though Chandler, the sophomore Montgomery Bell Academy running back, added a few pounds to creep over 200 pounds, he still isn’t what you’d call a bruiser.

That’s why Pruitt brought in Michigan State transfer Madre London, added freshman Jeremy Banks and converted Princeton Fant to the offensive backfield. It’s not an indictment of Chandler, who is expected to be the Vols’ primary back, but there are some questions about whether or not he is an every-down back in the SEC.

Many teams thought he would be out of high school, when he chose the Vols over Georgia, Ole Miss and others. Now, he’s just got to prove he’s the stud everybody thought he’d be a couple seasons ago. As a true freshman, he rushed for 305 yards and a 4.3-yard average running behind an absolutely horrible offensive line that was injury-riddled and inefficient. He also had 10 catches for 108 more yards.

With the way Tyson Helton wants UT to be able to throw the ball, Chandler’s ability to catch out of the backfield could be a major asset. But with Will Friend coaching the offensive line, Trey Smith back and that group expected to be better, it’s time for Chandler to shine.

He’s got another gear on the second level and has proved the ability to get outside the tackles. It’s arguable that toward the end of a forgettable 2017 season, he was more productive than John Kelly, who left for the NFL a year early and was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams.

The Vols need Chandler to be a beast. While it’s nice to have a veteran bruiser like London who has a lot of carries in the rugged Big Ten, and the Orange & White Game breakout of Tim Jordan was encouraging, this should be Chandler’s job. The Vols need him to realize his massive potential, and they’ll be a better team if the most talented player earns it.

Coming from Alabama, where it wasn’t abnormal to watch the Crimson Tide throw out fourth-string runners that could start for 100 other college football teams, Pruitt predictably wants quality depth at the position.

“I think if you’re going to be good at running the football in this league, you better probably have four to six guys,” Pruitt said at SEC Media Days this week. “It’s a physical game. When you turn around and hand the ball (off), there’s 11 guys on the other side that are usually big and fast and angry trying to hit you, so there’s lots of contact. I think you probably need four to six guys.

“It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out with these guys. I know they’re working hard. I think we’ll probably need all of them before the year’s over with.”

That’s true, and the Vols will definitely need at least four of those guys to step up. But Chandler needs to be an elite playmaker, a guy who is capable of being a game-breaker and somebody who can get the tough yards as well. If he’s not, the Vols will be forced to have one of its most electric athletes watching from the sideline.

DEFENSE

Darrell Taylor, Junior Outside Linebacker

A year ago, as a redshirt sophomore defensive end, Taylor was supposed to be a defensive leader who got after the passer for Bob Shoop’s defense. Instead, he was a nonfactor late in the season, finishing with just 27 tackles and 4.5 for a loss, only making headlines when he was suspended indefinitely.

Some of the whispers surrounding Taylor’s off-the-field actions were disturbing as he obviously battled maturity issues. It was yet another frustrating aspect of a forgettable ’17 season under Butch Jones.

Now, with Pruitt in town, Taylor moved back a level to play outside linebacker where he is expected to play pass-rushing specialist outside linebacker. It’s a spot he played this spring to mixed results, and he shed 7 pounds this offseason and now sits at 247 pounds. The Virginia native looks like the perfect fit for the position, and he could again be a leader on what is expected to be one of UT’s deepest positions.

At linebacker, the Vols should have Taylor, Jonathan Kongbo, Jordan Allen, Darrin Kirkland Jr., Daniel Bituli, Will Ignont, JJ Peterson, Deandre Johnson, Austin Smith and others. That’s a very strong unit on paper. If Taylor produces the way he should, though, he’s a perfect prospect to break out under the new coaching staff. It’s just a matter of how he adapts to position coach Chris Rumph’s tough-love style.

Pruitt actually praised Taylor’s work in the spring, though he didn’t talk much about individual players too often.

“Darrell has done a good job this spring,” Pruitt said, according to GoVols247’s Patrick Brown. “He seems to be willing to learn. He needs to improve on how he plays on special teams, I can tell you that. I told him that after the scrimmage (on Saturday).

“He’s done some good things on defense from rushing the quarterback and was stout at the end of the line, but running down on the punt team, he couldn’t run no faster than me. That’s not how we want to practice.”

Typical Pruitt; praise with some grief mixed in. But it’s also been typical of Taylor, who can show flashes then frustration. If the Vols are going to be much-improved in 2018, they absolutely have to cause some duress on opposing quarterbacks. I love Deandre Johnson’s potential, and Jordan Allen and JJ Peterson could help, too. Everybody is intrigued to see what Kongbo looks like on the second level.

But Taylor can be a star. Whether he is or not is up to him, how much he grows up and how quickly he learns.

 

Families fight. Tempers flare. Insults — and sometimes punches — get thrown.

That’s the way it is in the South, and, though I haven’t been out of this region too much in my life, I assume that’s the way it is everywhere else, too. If you haven’t seen a conversation get a little heated at a family reunion, well, I’m not sure you’re from ’round these parts.

Most of the folks running programs in the SEC are, indeed, from ’round these parts.

Many of them have coached together, played against each other, recruited the same players and cut teeth on the same coaches.

Heck, the Nick Saban tree has reached its gnarled roots all over the conference. Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher, Georgia coach Kirby Smart and Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt are all disciples of college football’s greatest coach. Will Muschamp played at Georgia, coordinated at Auburn, led a program at Florida. Heck, even “outsiders” like that Yankee Dan Mullen down in Gainesville has spent enough time in the league now that he’s common-law.

Some of these good ol’ boys like each other, take weekends at the lake together, shoot the breeze about a little ball together. Some of them don’t care much for one another.

That’s how good ol’ boys are.

So, when former Georgia players Aaron Murray and David Pollack puckered their bottom lips out and went poor-mouthing Pruitt on national platforms on Wednesday, nobody should have been surprised.

Said Murray to a radio station at the always-entertaining circus of SEC Media Days in Atlanta:

“I don’t know if his personality is fit to be a head coach. As a head coach, there’s so many things that go into it. It’s not just going out there and coaching. You have to deal with front office. You’ve got to go talk with the president. You have to deal with boosters. You have to deal with the offense. The defense. It’s not just going in there and scheming it up. … I don’t think he’s the right guy to kind of be the CEO of a corporation. He’s really good managing just a defense and being a defensive coordinator. He needs to prove to me that he can handle the whole ship. We’ll see what happens this year. I don’t think it helps that he doesn’t have a lot of talent at Tennessee.”

Pollack saw a place to pile on, and did so. The former UGA defensive end who took his share of beatings at the hands of the Vols has never had too much good to say about the program, anyway. He said according to Saturday Down South’s Michael Wayne Bratton:

“To address Aaron’s (Murray) comment — because I think it needs to be addressed a little bit — the stories that I have heard and some of y’all have heard that came out of Athens – that are true, (from) coaches that were on the staff, some of the things Jeremy Pruitt did to Mark Richt, some coaches would tell you are the most disrespectful, most crazy things they heard.

“So, I’ll be curious to watch Jeremy Pruitt as he evolves with this relationship with Phillip Fulmer because Jeremy Pruitt did a good job when he was with Nick Saban — because he knew where he stood. He did a good job with Jimbo Fisher — they let you know where you stand. The hierarchy was very clear. How does he evolve as a head coach?

“He put on a good show (at the main podium at SEC Media Days), he definitely showed you what he has. I want to see if he continues to treat people in the correct manner, if he respects authority, because to be honest, the stories we’ve heard — we’ve all heard the same stories, it was pretty bad. It was disrespectful, so that’s what I’m interested to see.”

In a separate interview, legendary high school coach and former Pruitt boss Rush Propst said Georgia was a little too “country club” before Pruitt got there. Saban himself addressed the buzz during his portion of Media Days.

Nick Saban’s response when asked about Jeremy Pruitt following comments from Aaron Murray & David Pollack: “He was always very respectful… I have never seen that style. It’s really surprising to me to hear people say that, because I’ve never seen it.”
Full quote from Saban: pic.twitter.com/Y3uXAukzRI

— SEC Mike (@MichaelWBratton) July 18, 2018

That Pruitt punched back only made things better. I’d have probably told him to take off his skinny jeans and put on some blue jeans, but that’s just me. Pruitt was a little more diplomatic but still got his point across.

“I look at it like this: 15 years ago, I was a kindergarten teacher, and today I’m the head coach at Tennessee,” Pruitt said. “So you probably don’t make that ascension unless you know how to treat people.”

You sick of reading quotes?

Oh, me neither.

This is awesome.

All that’s really missing is a soft pack of Winstons, a case of Bud Diesel and maybe a stained wife-beater or two. This is as close as we’ve gotten to “how-big-a-boy-are-ya” in this league in a long time. When a bunch of Southern boys get together and get in a baccer-spittin’ contest, fur may fly.

Sometimes, as we saw Wednesday, some of that Sand Mountain may come out when he gets a little sand in his craw. I was halfway waiting for a “By gawd” to be uttered.

Let’s all hope this is today’s SEC.

For us Tennessee fans, it may be a little while before we can re-enter the fracas on the football field, but Pruitt is already proving he can go into living rooms and battle the titans on the trail. He isn’t a stranger to this league or putting on his big-boy britches in hairy situations. He’s paid his dues as an assistant on the best teams in this era and in this country in the past decade, and this is now his time to run his program his way.

Mark Richt got to run his Georgia program his way, and though he was very successful during his tenure in Athens, his teams lacked toughness and he never really did as much with all that talent as he probably should have. The fans said it. The media said it. Some of Richt’s former players have even said it.

It took two years for favorite son Kirby Smart to come in and take the Dawgs to the cusp of the national championship last year.

Did he do something Richt couldn’t do or did he just inherit the talent that Richt was eventually going to do it with? We won’t ever know the answer to that. But [if the reports and the comments are true] Pruitt obviously didn’t care for the way things were going down there during his short stint with UGA.

Long-time SEC reporter Tony Barnhart said in the book Fulmer Hires Pruitt that Pruitt was outspoken about UGA’s need for a better indoor practice facility. Maybe that was one of the many things that irked the assistant; Richt didn’t run the type of program and do all the things Pruitt thought he needed to do to be successful.

When that’s the case, and things are going downhill [remember, Richt was fired following that season] things get a little haywire, especially when you’ve got alpha coaches who like to speak their minds.

“For the longest time when Mark Richt was there, there was this ongoing debate as to whether or not Georgia needed an indoor practice facility,” Barnhart said. “They had a small version and was not big. Some were saying Georgia needs one because Tennessee has one, Alabama has one, Auburn has one; some were saying well no they don’t need one. Mark Richt mentioned it, but he never pushed the issue and then one day someone came to Jeremy and asked him about it and he said Georgia is at a competitive disadvantage in not having an indoor practice facility at a place like Georgia. So that also impressed me and these things made me believe that someday he was going to be a head coach.”

Now he is, and he’s entering a situation at Tennessee that needs discipline, needs toughness, needs bluntness, needs truth. For years, we were lied to by a thin-skinned politician of a coach in Butch Jones, a man Paul Finebaum referred to on Wednesday as a “pathetic carny barker.”

Pruitt has been a breath of fresh air and the complete opposite.

Will he win football games? We can’t know that, and you absolutely cannot be “sold” on him until he does because if there’s anything Tennessee fans should know by now, it’s how to get sucked into faux hope and get burned.

But Vols fans love somebody who’ll stand up for their team and their program. Fulmer did it back in the day, and even though the Ol’ Ball Coach Steve Spurrier and his one-liners ran rivets down big orange chalkboards, the Battle Captain was good for a quip every now and then. Before him, Johnny Majors authored some of the greatest coaches shows and player comments in the history of the league. After Fulmer, of course, was Lane Kiffin and all the immature fun that brought.

Pruitt isn’t going to just sit back and water bamboo or stack bricks. As we saw on Wednesday, he’ll hurl those bricks back in the direction where they came. It was a heck of a good time, wasn’t it; like a post-wreck tongue-lashing at Talladega. And two of the three folks involved were gussied-up Georgia pretty boys with $100 haircuts.

Can you imagine what it’s gonna be like when Pruitt gets “his” players in there and starts going toe-to-toe with Smart [no love lost with that pair] or former bosses Saban and Fisher? This has the potential to be a whole lot of fun.

Whoo-wee! Rubbin’, they say, is racin’.

If this is today’s SEC, buckle up boys!

Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt knows that he needs to make the right decision about which quarterback to trot out onto the field this fall, but he also knows the decision needs to be made quickly.

At the podium during his main room appearance at SEC Media Days this morning, Pruitt said that each of the four quarterbacks he’ll have at his disposal this fall is going to get a chance to earn playing time.

“We have two young men, Jarrett [Guarantano] and Will [McBride] that were there in the spring,” Pruitt said. “They’ll have 15 practices under their belt. We add Keller Chryst coming from Stanford who has played football there, has experience. And we are adding another young man from California, J.T. Shrout. We’ll give those guys opportunities in fall camp.”

Despite everyone getting a chance, conventional wisdom suggests that the quarterback competition is going to come down to Guarantano and Chryst. Guarantano redshirted in 2016 and then threw for 997 yards and 4 touchdowns with 2 interceptions in 6 starts and 9 games played last season. Like Guarantano, Chryst redshirted as a freshman at Stanford. He then played in four games as a sophomore and 12 games as a junior last season, going 5-2 as the starter before losing the job to K.J. Costello. He threw for 962 yards and 8 touchdowns. Guarantano has an edge in the form of having a spring with Pruitt already under his belt, while Chryst may have an edge by being more of a true pro-style quarterback to fit into Tyson Helton’s offensive system.

McBride and Shrout may well be good prospects, but they simply don’t have the experience that the other two do. In filling in for an injured Guarantano last season, McBride threw for 152 yards and a touchdown with 2 interceptions, and he rushed 18 times for 70 yards. Incoming 3-star pro-style quarterback JT Shrout reportedly held his own at a QB camp last summer against some elite competition, including 5-star Georgia signee Justin Fields, the top dual-threat quarterback in the class, but Shrout is still just a true freshman.

Whichever guy is going to win the starting job this fall is going to have to do so quickly, as Pruitt also said that he is aware of the need to make an early decision for the sake of getting that guy ready to play.

“I think for us seeing what these other two new guys can do,” Pruitt said, “along with what the guys, see how they progress in fall camp, I think it’s going to be important for us as a staff to start whittling it down pretty fast so we can kind of create rhythm and timing and a little bit of chemistry on offense and figure out who our guys are going to be.”

Pruitt said earlier this year that he may not know which quarterback was going to start until the fourth quarter of the first game, and by that he may have just meant that you don’t really know how good a guy is until you see him in live action with the game on the line. But by his statement today, don’t expect him to draw out the quarterback competition this fall any longer than is absolutely necessary.

Tennessee fans got some not unexpected yet still extremely welcome news this morning when Jeremy Pruitt confirmed that two key players would be ready to go for fall camp:

JJ Peterson will “absolutely” be ready to go for camp.

Trey Smith is back.

Still the head coach despite Aaron Murray’s zingers. https://t.co/bLETLFdAuX

— @GrantRamey (@GrantRamey) July 18, 2018

Trey Smith’s availability was up in the air since a mysterious medical condition limited him in the spring. Today’s confirmation that it won’t keep him off the field this fall is huge news for an offensive line in desperate need of all hands on deck and a team looking for some stability and improvement in nearly every key area.

JJ Peterson, the highest-ranked player of the Class of 2018, has yet to arrive on campus despite signing a letter of intent back in February, and his absence has been a source of concern for some time. Pruitt’s confidence that he’ll be ready to go this fall is more welcome news for Tennessee.