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A lot of college football fans and analysts were high on the Tennessee Volunteers heading into the 2020 football season. In other news, water continues to be wet. Tennessee is notorious for being one of the most overhyped teams in college football year after year.
Head coach Jeremy Pruitt led the Vols to an 8-5 mark a year ago and after starting this season 2-0 things seemed to be going pretty well on Rocky Top. Fast-forward to now and Tennessee has lost five straight and the majority of the Tennessee fan base seems to be done with Pruitt, who is now 15-17 as the Vols’ head coach.
Paul Finebaum even had relatively high expectations for Tennessee heading into this season. He was firmly in Pruitt’s corner, but now, not so much. On top of the Vols simply being a bad football team which is hurting Pruitt’s relationship with fans in Knoxville, Finebaum pointed to the fact that his poor performance with the media week after week isn’t helping his cause either.
“For all of the things that Jeremy Pruitt has done well at Tennessee and I’ll have to get back to you on what those are, his public relations has been abysmal,” Finebaum said Monday during his weekly spot on WJOX FM. “That’s from the beginning. I know people at Tennessee that have offered to help him and council him and try to give him opportunities. I’ve been on the set with him before in Knoxville.
“I asked him once just a layup on Phil Fulmer and he couldn’t even answer that correctly. He is still a high-school football coach when it comes to public relations. I know that probably sounds like an insult to the great high-school coaches out there who are communicators. What I mean by that is he just will not communicate in an appropriate way.”
So, not only did Finebaum absolutely torch Pruitt and his lack of ability to simply communicate, he even put him on blast explaining that the university has even offered to help him in the public relations world but that hasn’t seemed to help either.
If Pruitt was winning football games then nobody would care about his dullness in press conferences. Just look at the Bill Belichick’s and Nick Saban’s of the world, winning trumps good soundbites but if you’re in charge of a bad football team everything gets magnified even more.
[H/T 247 Sports]