Ascension of Jeremy Pruitt to Tennessee Vols football coach sparked by Hoover High School job

Alex Binder still remembers the air mattress.

The former Hoover High School linebacker only saw it with his own eyes two or three times. But everyone knew and it became a recurring conversation for Binder and his Hoover teammates in the mid-2000s: Jeremy Pruitt, their defensive coordinator, slept on a small, uncomfortable air mattress in the coaches’ offices during the season.

Pruitt was a young, single coach working his way through the ranks in a fieldhouse where a lot of coaches spent countless laborious days. But Pruitt took it to a new level, sometimes sleeping in the facility when other coaches went home to grab a few hours of sleep. He was there when players arrived for early morning workouts and he was there at night for extra film study.

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The air mattress was deflated in the corner throughout, stashed out of the way in the high-traffic office and sometimes joined by dirty clothes.

“This is a high school coordinator working 16-hour days and he is doing that because of how much he loves his job and how much he loves football and how much he loves the kids he coaches,” Binder said. “Now, he’s a 4-million-dollar head coach in the SEC. You want to talk about a crazy 10 years, that’s unreal.”

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Pruitt was named Tennessee’s coach in early December, the latest step in his climb since his days sleeping in the Hoover High offices.

“When we were all dumb teenagers, we didn’t understand it,” Binder said. “But now it makes sense.”

Coming to Hoover

Working at Hoover marked Pruitt’s first big break in the coaching world, setting the stage for all that has come since. He left the staff of his father, Dale Pruitt, and jumped to the powerhouse program outside Birmingham, Ala., which would be featured for two years on MTV’s “Two-A-Days.”

But the defensive backs coaching job that he landed in 2004 was never supposed to be his.

The way then-Hoover coach Rush Propst remembers it, Pruitt called him 50 times between his work and home phones and left a message every time. Propst was familiar with Pruitt from his time as a walk-on at Alabama and thought highly of Pruitt’s father – a longtime high school coach in Alabama.

The problem was Propst and his defensive coordinator Todd Watson had a coach in mind with the deal all but done.

Propst gave in and opted to bring the persistent candidate in for an interview, figuring if the younger Pruitt was anything like his father that he could be a hit. Propst was in the interview for less than a half an hour before he had seen all he needed to see.

“Far and away, Jeremy Pruitt was 10 times better than the guy we thought we were going to give the job to,” Propst said.

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Propst saw an energy and passion in Pruitt that he felt would click with his players. From a strictly on-field standpoint, Pruitt brought elements that Propst felt would give the Hoover secondary an edge, while also being a quality special teams coaching candidate as well.

He took on both roles in his first season. Game-changing special teams plays became seemingly routine in Hoover’s games in that 2004 season, as did lockdown secondary play in the red zone. Propst credited those successes to Pruitt’s ability to develop a perfect scheme, but also to translating it into effectively and concisely teaching players on the field.

“The thing that Jeremy does so much better than most people is he simplifies the game for the players and the players love him for it,” said Propst, who now coaches at Colquitt County High School in Moultrie, Ga.

And when Watson left after that season, Propst sat down with Pruitt a day later and offered him the defensive coordinator position. It was an easy decision, Propst said, after a year of seeing Pruitt display a special talent at getting players to give their all constantly.

“They would literally give anything they can for Jeremy Pruitt,” Propst said. “I saw the gravitation to Jeremy fast. … He has that ability to make players play for him. He can work the stew out of them and then they will line up and die for him.”

Infectious

Hoover had a long line of successful defensive coordinators, with Watson leaving in 2005 to take a position at Troy. And Pruitt made a big impression right away.

“Everybody knew he was special,” Binder said. “We just didn’t know how special yet.”

It was clear immediately to former Hoover defensive back Will Lowery that Pruitt was a high-level coach with a deep knowledge of the game. And he got an early look at Pruitt’s intensity. Lowery, who went on to play defensive back at Alabama, fancied himself more of a basketball player when Pruitt arrived at Hoover and Pruitt wasn’t having any of it.

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Pruitt “basically drug” Lowery to spring practices, where the stories of Pruitt’s competitiveness are most visible. He would rip into players on special teams during a walkthrough, wanting to win each rep of a seemingly unremarkable afternoon as if it were a national championship game.

“His hunger to succeed and his competitive edge is infectious,” Lowery said. “It rubs off on you.”

Binder described Pruitt as “a mess out on the field” during practices, a special melding of extremely fired up and engaged. Then there was a trademark move that Hoover players came to know all too well. Pruitt wore a visor to practice – that is, until he suddenly wasn’t wearing it.

“I swear he was a marksman with a visor,” Binder said. “He could hit you from 20 or 30 yards with the visor. If you saw that visor come – and he would sling it – he was going to be on you quick.”

Former Hoover defensive tackle Kerry Murphy recalled the way Pruitt would run around in practices, bouncing from position group to position group with excitement. “Focus, aight?” was a commonly heard refrain, dropping a now-catchphrase that Lowery and Murphy both say dates back at least to his time at Hoover.

The same intensity carried over to the film room, where Pruitt is “a film eater,” Murphy said. Players learned quickly they better be in each clip of the film, lest they be charged with a “loaf” and forced to run by the complacency-hating Pruitt.

“When our sprints turned into fat man jogs, coach Pruitt put his hand in our back and ran with us and was saying, ‘Let’s go, come on, finish,’ ” said Murphy, who played at Alabama.

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Binder, Lowery and Murphy all still rave about Pruitt’s coaching skills, but also who he is. To a man, each said that his way of connecting with players has made him a success throughout his career. He was there to talk about life and consistently showed he had their best interest at heart.

And for all the intensity, Lowery insists Pruitt has more one-liners than anybody in a style that is “pretty magnificent.”

“We actively wanted to do well for him,” Binder said. “We wanted praise from him. That’s a cool thing that not every coach has got. It’s one of those things that plenty of people know the game of football and plenty of people know the play calls, but to have a personality that your players actively want to go out there to perform and make you happy and see a sign of approval on you, you can’t beat that.”

Destined for stardom

Pruitt’s first crack as Hoover’s defensive coordinator was a baptism by fire.

Hoover was nationally ranked heading into the season with its 2005 opener coming against Nease (Fla.), which featured a star quarterback named Tim Tebow. The Hoover coaches flew to Florida in the spring to scout Nease and Tebow, who went on to be a first-round NFL Draft pick after winning a Heisman at Florida, when Pruitt made a key observation.

“We are sitting up in the stands and Jeremy goes, ‘I think we can cause a few fumbles by the way he carries the ball loosely on scrambles,’ ” Propst said.

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Pruitt hammered home how to punch the ball away from Tebow in practices, which was not a new emphasis. Binder called forcing turnovers Pruitt’s “bread and butter,” adding that Pruitt would rather give up more yards with a player trying to rip a ball out than see an immediate tackle.

Pruitt’s words proved prophetic. Hoover forced Tebow to fumble twice, including on a critical play in the fourth quarter that flipped the nationally televised game in Hoover’s favor.

Hoover dropped only one game that year, a 39-28 loss to Tuscaloosa County in Week 5. Binder chalked up the defeat to a combination of overconfidence from the players and a surreal performance from their opponent.

Braced for Pruitt’s wrath, the Bucs instead saw their defensive coordinator take the loss harder than anyone else.

“Instead of doing what a lot of people might have done by running us to death and putting the blame on the kids, he took it to heart,” Binder said. “He changed up a lot of things from that week for the rest of the season. After that game, our attitudes changed. And the way he set us up after that, we hit a new stride and never looked back.”

Hoover saw Tuscaloosa County again in the state quarterfinals and Binder doesn’t recall a time the opposing offense cross midfield. Propst said Pruitt schemed Tuscaloosa County “to no end” and Hoover got easy revenge in a 42-8 win.

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“No coach is perfect and no defensive coordinator is perfect, but Pruitt’s ability to make adjustments is legendary,” Binder said. “You can see it all the way up to the college level.”

Hoover won its fourth straight state title two weeks later and Propst knew the caliber of coach he had on his staff. He kept him for one more season before Pruitt was off to Alabama to join Nick Saban’s staff as a director of player development.

“I knew he was the real deal when we won it,” Propst said. “At the end of that year, I said he is destined for greatness and destined for stardom.”

Heavy-hitter

Five days after the Tennessee coaching job opened with Butch Jones’ firing, Lowery fired up his Twitter. He said on Nov. 17 that Pruitt to Tennessee “makes sense for a lot of reasons.”

After Tennessee’s disastrous start to the coaching search, Murphy was talking to Josh Chapman – a fellow Hoover-to-Alabama defensive lineman – and said the Vols were about to come after Pruitt.

And when former UT coach Phillip Fulmer took over as athletic director a few days later, Propst was hoping and praying Pruitt would be the choice.

They all were right: Pruitt was introduced as the Tennessee head coach on Dec. 7.

“The dynamics of the SEC East are about to get crazy,” Binder said. “You just threw what I believe is going to be the biggest heavy-hitter of them all over at Tennessee.”

Little more than a decade has passed since Pruitt was the defensive coordinator at Hoover. He has been a successful defensive coordinator at Florida State, Georgia and Alabama in the years since, winning national titles just like he won state titles at Hoover.

“The guy literally eats, sleeps and breathes football around the clock,” Lowery said. “He is like Saban more so than any other coach I have been around in that respect. … Him and Saban don’t have that many other hobbies. They don’t really care that much about anything but football. They want to win and they want to play high-level defensive football. They just are all about it. It’s all they know.

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“It’s like they were put on this earth to coach football. He’s got that drive and that ‘it factor’ that could give him that ability to go really far as a coach. There have been a lot of coaches to come out from the Saban coaching tree and I really think he’s got the ability to be the very best one to come out from under Saban.”

Pruitt’s rise doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who played for him at Hoover. They saw the determination and competitive drive for three years of their high school lives.

It helped make the Hoover dynasty so great and Pruitt accepting the Tennessee job made for big news among former Hoover players – even bigger than a defensive coordinator sleeping on an air mattress.

“As we have gotten older, you see he must have really, really cared about what he was doing,” Binder said.