The Tennessee Volunteers football program and former coach Jeremy Pruitt received harsh penalties for a series of recruiting infractions during his three-year coaching tenure for the Vols.
From 2018-20, Pruitt committed an astounding 18 highest-level violations - meaning he paid 18 different athletes and their families $60,000 to play football in Knoxville - and he and his staff committed an additional 200 violations in that time. Tennessee did not receive a ban from playing in bowl games in upcoming seasons, but they were handed an $8 million fine (believed to be the largest fine for such crimes) and were forced to vacate all 11 wins from the 2019 and 2020 seasons, which dropped them out of the top 10 nationally for most wins.
Kay Norton, president emerita at Northern Colorado and the chief hearing officer for the NCAA panel, said that the violations were "egregious and expansive," and that this case was "one of the largest cases this committee has ever adjudicated."
Despite the damning evidence and that characterization of the case by Norton, Pruitt is still trying to paint the picture as if what he did was actually a good thing, claiming he committed these infractions to fight racial inequality. He said that he thought that after the death of George Floyd, he needed to come alongside the black community and his black athletes by illegally bribing these players with obscene amounts of money.
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“Then you throw in George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, okay, so you sit there as a white man and you see all of this going on and you can see these kids suffering … (It’s) pitiful when you sit in a room and you hear grown men, and I’m talking about our coaches too, when they talk about growing up and the circumstances that they’ve been under, because it’s hard for a white man to understand,” Pruitt said.
The real “pitiful” element of this situation is that Pruitt would believe that anyone would buy his pathetic attempt to frame his actions as a good thing. All of the deaths Pruitt mentioned didn’t take place until 2020 - two years after he started bribing players, thus making that excuse irrelevant. The two situations also don’t correlate at all; someone’s death, however tragic it may be, does not mean that people who have no connection to it should be offered illegal handouts.
If that’s the standard for how football programs try to illegally recruit players, then why didn’t white football athletes get this preferential treatment when Tony Timpa was killed at the hands of the police in 2016?
Pruitt thinks that his skin color means he's inherently blind to certain things, which is not true. The fact he’s white shouldn’t prevent him from seeing that his actions and argument for supporting them are a crock of nonsense. Part of his punishment is that he has been prevented him from being hired for another job for the foreseeable future, and based on how firmly he defended his corrupt scandal, we can all agree it's a good thing he'll have to sing "Rocky Top" from his living room couch on Saturdays.
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