KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – In three days, the Tennessee football team will kick-off the 2018 campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina in the Belk College Kickoff at Bank of America Stadium and head coach Jeremy Pruitt and the Vols are ready to close out the week strong.
“We try to close all the way until the game starts then try to take advantage of every opportunity that we have,” said Pruitt.
Finish the week was the message that Coach Pruitt preached today.
“There’s several guys that are competing out there. Jauan (Jennings) wasn’t there in the spring and he’s been banged up in fall camp. In the last week, from him, you’ve kind of seen a guy that’s hungry to play [because] he hasn’t played in a while,” stated Pruitt.
Despite playing just one game last season due to injury, Jennings is still considered a big-time player for the Vols. He has 746 career yards receiving with his breakout season coming in 2016 when he finished the year with 580 yards while scoring seven touchdowns.
“Marquez Callaway hurt his knee this summer, so he was a little bit limited early on in camp. Josh Palmer is a guy that’s taken a lot of reps. Brandon Johnson, Jordan Murphy, Cedric Tillman, Tyler Byrd — a lot of those guys have. So, I feel confident in our wide receivers. I think they compete really hard every day. They compete out on the perimeter and I’ve liked what I’ve seen in the last week.”
Johnson returns as the top receiver from a year ago after finishing with 482 total yards receiving, followed by Callaway who finished the year with 406 yards receiving and five touchdowns.
“From what I’ve seen, I like what I’ve seen out of our guys,” stated Pruitt. “From where we were at nine months ago to where we’re at today physically and mentally, I like the direction we’re headed.”
Following 23 fall camp practices the Vols are trying to close out the week strong before their big match up against No. 17/20 West Virginia on Saturday.
The game will be broadcasted live on CBS with Brad Nessler and Gary Danielson calling the action and Jamie Erdahl on the sideline. The game is slated for a 3:39 p.m. kickoff at Bank of America Stadium.
Jeremy Pruitt Post Practice Quotes (Aug. 29)
On having a couple extra days of prep:
“Yeah, I think the places that I’ve been and been fortunate to work at and the people I work with, I think we’ve always done a really good job from Wednesday to the end of the game. You do a lot of physical part on the front end of the week. On the back end, there’s a lot more mental. So today we had what we call ‘one reel’. A lot of people do it and we just kind of play the game on both sides of the ball, make calls, make checks. We do that on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We’ll do another one on Friday night. We try to close all the way until the game starts then try to take advantage of every opportunity that we have.”
On what sets West Virginia’s quarterback Will Grier and wide receiver David Sills apart:
“I think they, first of all, they’ve got a really good scheme. They keep you spread out. They’re balanced on offense. In their throw game they’ve got a lot of screens, a lot of RPOs. They’ve got max protections. They have traditional drop-back. They’ve got really good spacing. They have an understanding of how to protect the quarterback and you can tell the quarterbacks, whether it was [Will] Grier or any of the backups that played last year, they had an understanding of where the pressure was coming from, how they were being protected. They do a really nice job. That speaks to the coaching that Coach [Dana] Holgorsen’s done. On the outside they’ve got guys that have done a good job recruiting guys that can get open, can win 50/50 balls. They’re good after the catch. They’ve got a really good bunch of wide receivers and option quarterback does a good job.”
On if it’s an advantage to have started classes later than West Virginia:
“You know I’m not very familiar with when they started school. I think there’s a lot that plays into having an advantage when they get out for summer school because that’s different all over the country. I know there’s some schools that aren’t even in session right now. The schools are on quarters, but maybe they went through at the beginning of fall camp, so I don’t know. I‘m just going to worry about what we have here and how we can kind of optimize our potential.”
On if what a player does in a game is more important than what they do in practice:
“Well, most of the really good players, there’s some point in practice that you realize that they’ve got ability. In my time, most of the best players have been some of the best practicers. Very rarely do you see a guy that practices really bad, number one, that he gets an opportunity to play. Most folks that don’t practice very good, they don’t get to play so nobody ever knows what they can do. You do see some guys that maybe kind of respond and make some plays in the game.”
On the state of the offensive line:
“I think we have several guys that probably deserve to play, which is probably a good thing because that means we have a little bit of depth. I’m sure we’ll play more than five guys. We’ll probably need to, and I think we have guys who have earned the right to play.”
On the wide receivers’ performance in practice:
“There’s several guys that are competing out there. Jauan (Jennings) wasn’t there in the spring and he’s been banged up in fall camp. In the last week, from him, you’ve kind of seen a guy that’s hungry to play [because] he hasn’t played in awhile. Marquez Callaway hurt his knee this summer, so he was a little bit limited early on in camp. Josh Palmer is a guy that’s taken a lot of reps. Brandon Johnson, Jordan Murphy, Cedric Tillman, Tyler Byrd — a lot of those guys have. So I feel confident in our wide receivers. I think they compete really hard every day. They compete out on the perimeter and I’ve liked what I’ve seen in the last week.”
On the health of the team going into the season opener against West Virginia:
“In football, once you start, you never have a team that’s fully healthy. But everybody is going to play.”
On final preparations for the first game:
“I was talking to my brother today, he’s a head coach for the first time and they played last week. We were talking about his game, and he said that at 6 o’clock his principal came up to him and asked him if he had seen the officials. And he said, ‘no I haven’t’. And then the principal said ‘well you did call and make sure we had officials for this game, right?’. And he said ‘no, I thought you did that.’ So we kind of chuckled about that. I’m glad that I don’t have to set up the officials for this game.”
On the locations of the coaches during the game:
“We probably didn’t really settle it until the last couple days. There’s a lot of new rules. There used to be no rules, so you could put anybody anywhere that you wanted to put them and now we have rules that you can only have so many headsets, you can only have so many guys that can talk, you have to be a certain amount of years out of college to be in the booth. So it takes awhile to figure out all of the rules, but I think we have it figured out now.”
On the decision not to scrimmage last weekend or this week:
“Anywhere I’ve ever coached we’ve never scrimmaged the week before the first game. You’ve got two fall scrimmages, [then] you start prepping and then you have a normal practice week.”
On what he’s looking forward to most this week:
“I’m looking forward to seeing how well our staff has prepared our team. Is our team going to compete the way we want them to compete? Kind of all the intangibles that we’re looking for? You’ve been working for nine months trying to build a team … you kind of have an idea of what kind of identity you want them to have, but what they put out on the field, how they play, all that, it’s the first time they get a chance to show who they are, so I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
On how much more is on his plate as a head coach as opposed to being a defensive coordinator:
“I would day a whole lot. Just from a standpoint of travel, itineraries, dress, academics, the whole thing. If you’re in charge of an entire program there’s more to it than just those small parts. But I’ve got really good guys working for me. These guys do a fantastic job, which allows me to coach, which is what I want to do.”
On how he expects the team to handle adversity early on in the season:
“From what I’ve seen, I like what I’ve seen out of our guys. From where we were at nine months ago to where we’re at today physically and mentally, I like the direction we’re headed. ‘What am I going to see on Saturday?’ I don’t know. If I knew that we wouldn’t play the game probably. We’ll see. That’s the whole reason we do what we do. You get an opportunity and everybody gets to see when the lights come on how you’re going to perform, how you’re going to handle adversity.”
On if they have decided on a starting punter heading into Saturday’s game:
“I would say that both guys probably would kick.”
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