Tennessee football: Looking back at Jeremy Pruitt’s games coaching against the Vols

Tennessee football head coach Jeremy Pruitt went against the Volunteers as a defensive coordinator with the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs.

Jeremy Pruitt is very familiar coaching against Tennessee football. When he joined Nick Saban’s staff with the Alabama Crimson Tide, he went against the Vols as an assistant in some capacity every year from 2007 to 2012. And over the last four years, he has coached against UT as a defensive coordinator, twice with the Georgia Bulldogs and twice with Alabama.

That makes for 10 games in which he has face the Vols, and he has traveled to Rocky Top to coach five of those games. But how has he done the past four years, when he could make an actual impact by calling plays for the team?

After all, Tennessee football wouldn’t want to replace Butch Jones with a guy that Jones was able to get the best of, would they? Well, there’s a bit more nuance to something of that nature. What’s clear, though, is the Vols and Pruitt have experience with each other.

In this post, we’re going to look back at that experience. To be fair, we’ll ignore his first six years with Alabama. After all, for three of those years he was just the director of player development, and for another three he coached defensive backs. But he never called plays.

Pruitt didn’t get that role until joining the Florida State Seminoles in 2013. And while he did win a national championship his one year there, he never went against the Vols. That changed when he joined Mark Richt’s staff in 2014.

So from that point, he has gone four straight years calling plays against the Vols. And he had a direct impact on whether or not his teams were able to win those games. How has he fared each time? What was his role?

With Pruitt now an ally of Rocky Top, let’s take one look back at the times he was a major foe. Here is a look at how he performed as a defensive coordinator when his teams went up against Tennessee football.