Tennessee football: Notes from Vols coaches fall camp media session

Tennessee football opened up fall camp with a media session from Jeremy Pruitt and other Volunteers coaches on Thursday. Here are our big takeaways.

With fall camp set to begin Friday, Jeremy Pruitt and five Tennessee football staff members spoke with the media Thursday about getting things going. They covered numerous topics, from personnel to their fellow staff members.

Pruitt talked about basic things like communication, improvement, continuity, and football IQs. But he and the staff were much more revealing than anybody affiliated with the program was during SEC Media Days.

In addition to Pruitt, defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach Derrick Ansley, offensive coordinator Jim Chaney, special teams coach and inside linebackers coach Kevin Sherrer, wide receivers coach Tee Martin and outside linebackers coach Chris Rumph all spoke with the media. You can here the assistants all speak by clicking on this link.

The short takeaway from this is that Pruitt is much more excited about the state of the Vols heading into this year than he was heading into last year. With a full offseason to work with the guys, a bit of a revamped staff, and conditioning done the way he wants it, he has every reason for that excitement.

After hearing everybody speak, despite typical coach speak oozing through, we picked up enough information to give you a few of our top notes from the day. It’s one of the advantages of Pruitt letting his assistants talk to the media. And he should get some credit for doing that. So we’re going to break all of that down here.

You can listen to the full quotes from Pruitt by clicking the YouTube link above or going to this UTSports link. We already provided the link to the assistants speaking. But for the crucial points that stood out from all of the media sessions combined, take a look at the next few slides. These are our five takeaways after hearing Pruitt and those five assistants.