Vol fans are understandably frustrated. How could they not be? Tennessee hasn't won the SEC East since 2007. They haven't won the conference since 1998. What some have liked to view as a decade of dysfunction could honestly be more broadly referred to as two decades of disappointment. Athletic directors have come and gone, each one leaving behind their own special mess for the next administrator to try and clean up. Bad hires and botched searches have left the Vols settling for their new head coaches on more than one occasion. Mediocre results on the field have led to decreasing returns in recruiting, causing the Vols to fall further and further behind other programs. Head coaches in over their heads have made hires that have stunted the development of the players and the program to such a degree that elite talent that makes its way to Knoxville has more often than not failed to live up to expectations. A program that had become accustomed to having players drafted every single year has seen draft droughts that further hurt them in trying to lure the best of the best to Rocky Top. So why should fans even pretend to be optimistic right now?
I mean, look at the sloppy searches that led to the Butch Jones and Jeremy Pruitt hirings. Honestly, as frustrating as the search was the led the Vols to Jones, in hindsight it looks brilliantly competent compared to the publicly played out nightmare scenario of late 2017. Once again, to fans it looks like the program settled for who they could get instead of hiring the best man for the job after a botched search. The good news is that the journey can be a disaster and still end up getting you to the perfect destination.
COACHING STAFF
With any new hire, the first thing that fans will look at is the staff that they assemble. Are they going out and hiring the best of the best? In the case of Butch Jones, a couple of hires might check that box off. However, for the most part, he hired with comfort in mind. With the exceptions of Robert Gillespie and Tommy Thigpen, he had some degree of familiarity with everyone he hired and had coached alongside most of them. Thigpen had an indirect connection as he had worked with assistant head coach and defensive backs coach Willie Martinez, so the only true outsider was Gillespie. It was a staff well-suited to win at Cincinnati. It was less well-suited to win in the SEC. After a 5-7 season and less than impressive results in 2013, the 2014 staff was exactly the same.
Jeremy Pruitt hired a staff that had largely won at bigger programs. Now, he had coached with many of them. He had a history with Kevin Sherrer, Chris Rumph, Chris Weinke, Charles Kelly, Will Friend, Tracy Rocker, and Brian Niedermeyer. He plucked Tyson Helton from his brother's staff at USC. He hired former Vol Terry Fair and grabbed a man well-known for his development of players in David Johnson from Memphis. He also went out and snagged a highly-respected strength and conditioning coach from the NFL in Craig Fitzgerald. When the first season in Knoxville led to largely underwhelming results, rather than resting on his laurels, Pruitt made changes. His new staff includes former Tennessee and Georgia offensive coordinator Jim Chaney, former Alabama and Oakland defensive backs coach Derrick Ansley as defensive coordinator, Kevin Sherrer moved from defensive coordinator to special teams coordinator, Tee Martin returned home to Tennessee as the assistant head coach, passing game coordinator, and wide receiver coach, David Johnson moved from wideouts to running backs, and Chris Weinke from running backs to quarterbacks. Talk about a staff shuffle as Pruitt fought to keep the coaches he sought to retain and let others move on, willingly or unwillingly. He also made quite certain that they fought to keep Craig Fitzgerald in the mix even though he was being pursued by his alma mater.
Those are significant and meaningful adjustments being made by a coach determined to win, friendships be damned. It's clear that Pruitt understands the business side of the job and doesn't let personal relationships get in the way of necessary changes. That was a noted criticism of Butch Jones as he tended to wait until his hand was forced to make any changes, overvaluing his friendships in a business where you can't let things be personal due to the short leash every new head coach finds themselves on.
RECRUITING
What about recruiting? That was largely viewed as Butch Jones's bread and butter. When it came to salvaging the 2013 class, he managed to bring in the 25th ranked class nationally, although that class was just 11th in the SEC and finished with an average player rating of 85.86. Now, the more accurate measure of the talent being added to a roster is the average player rating, which would see that class ranking 28th in the nation in 2013 and still sitting at 11th in the SEC.
In 2014, with a year to work, Butch Jones would bring in a top ten recruiting class. It ranked 7th nationally, 5th in the SEC, and had an average player rating of 89.50. This class had its issues after the fact, but there are certain things to consider about this class that may have made it look better than it was. The most obvious thing to consider is that only Old Dominion had more signees than Tennessee's 32 and nobody else in the top 30 of the rankings had 30 or more in their class. The next thing to consider is that the Vols dropped two spots when you look at the average player rating, meaning the class wasn't quite as talented as some might like to think. One final thing to keep in mind is that the top half of the class was largely built up of in-state players and legacies, meaning that it wasn't necessarily something that was going to be sustainable.
Let's compare that to Pruitt's first two classes. Coming off of a miserable 4-8 campaign, Pruitt was able to land the 21st class in the nation, which was good for 8th in the SEC with an average player rating of 87.57. Before anyone starts to think that Jones had fewer players in his first class, Jones had one more player in his 2013 class than Pruitt did in 2018. One of the big differences between the two was the fact that Pruitt added double the 4-star talents. The average player rating was 23rd in the class, so again it was a slight drop regarding the overall talent in the class, although there was a weird outlier in Stanford that only had 15 signees but a higher average.
Let's jump into Pruitt's first full class because this is where the two very different recruiting philosophies come into stark contrast. The 2019 class would end up ranked 12th nationally, 7th in the SEC, and had an average player rating of 90.49. Had Tennessee been able to take a full 25 players, this was probably a top ten class nationally. They trailed Auburn by one-hundredth of a point and trailed Clemson by less than four points, so they didn't even need a particularly crazy addition to move into the top ten, but they elected to use a couple spots to add transfers in Aubrey Solomon and Deangelo Gibbs. The player average rating placed them 14th in a cycle when talent was more evenly distributed than the past few cycles, but it was Tennessee's highest player average rating since the 2009 recruiting cycle.
Okay, so right now at a quick glance it looks like we're splitting hairs, right? The national class ranking is a half position better for Jones and the SEC ranking is a half position in favor of Pruitt, so no big difference, right? The difference lies in a couple of numbers, most notably the average player rating. Through two classes, Jones had an average player rating of 87.68. Pruitt currently has one of 89.03. At first blush, that still seems pretty close, but Pruitt is dancing close to a 4-star average player rating and has a 4-star average in his 2019 class. By comparison, Jones never got any closer than his year two average rating. Jones's five-year class average was 88.24, and Pruitt's first class had a better average than both Jones's first and last classes at Tennessee.
I want to look at it in a different way though. Using the 247Sports composite rankings, Pruitt has had 46.7% of his signees/additions be either 4 or 5-star ranked recruits. By comparison, in those first two years under Jones, it was just 36.4% that were 4 or 5-star ranked, and over the course of the full five years of Jones's tenure at Tennessee, it was 37.5% of his signees that were 4 or 5-star recruits.
Bottom line: Butch Jones wasn't the recruiting guru so many thought he was. His two top-ranked classes both had 30+ signees, something that isn't even possible to do anymore in the current recruiting landscape due to changes in the rules. His recruiting was fool's gold, tricking people into thinking he was recruiting at an especially high level when the reality was that he was recruiting volume over quality. Pruitt isn't quite yet recruiting at the talent percentages of the best teams yet, but he has moved the needle much closer to the 50% or above percentage that indicates the strong classes of current perennial winners.
DEVELOPMENT AND RETENTION
This is the hardest to evaluate after just one year, but we'll begin this with retention. Now, since we're just considering the first year and a half of each coach, I won't be able to go into all the transfers Butch Jones had. Instead, I'll be looking just at the guys that either failed to qualify or left within that year and a half timeframe that Jones had brought in himself. Four from Jones's first class either didn't enroll or didn't make it to year two. The 2014 class was a mess, but none of that had come to pass by that summer.
In the case of Jeremy Pruitt's first two classes, he has one right now that seems unlikely to qualify from the 2019 class, but otherwise, everyone has enrolled and is still with the program.
How about development? Really tough to gauge with the limited sample size, but there is one potential indicator: physical changes from year one to year two. I'm going to do this in somewhat broader strokes, working out an average for the various position groups from one year to the next. I would love to use this as a gauge, but there's one issue with doing so: Tennessee hasn't put out a fall roster yet and so I can't get an accurate measure of the changes for the Vols right now.
Additionally, development comes down to coaching players into better versions of themselves. We won't be able to gauge that either until we see a couple years of products on the field. All I have right now is that early on, Pruitt appears to be doing a better job of retaining players he brings in, there are some early indicators that there are gains being made under Pruitt that may not have taken place under Jones, and we have no idea how the teaching aspect of things is going yet. Basically, we can't quite measure this one right now, but things early are at least trending Pruitt here.
CONCLUSION
With just a year and a half to compare, so far Jeremy Pruitt appears to be heading in the right direction. He has things going the right way in recruiting. He's assembled a staff of winners and made changes when things didn't work as expected after year one. He's seemingly got things moving in the right direction in player development, but at the very least that is still a tentative assessment.
As a rule, making the right moves in these three areas results in winning. Pruitt is doing the things you'd expect a head coach who will have success to do. There were troubling signs with Jones, and he won largely because of a handful of standout players who carried not just the rest of the team but also the staff. It will take another year and a half until we know for sure about Pruitt, but comparing him to Butch Jones just doesn't add up based on what we've seen so far.
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