Late last summer, former Tennessee Vols head coach Jeremy Pruitt was hit with a six-year show-cause ban by the NCAA as punishment for the recruiting violations that happened under Pruitt’s watch at UT from 2018 to 2020.
The NCAA charged Tennessee’s football program with 18 Level I rules violations for impermissible recruiting benefits that totaled around $60,000.
In addition to Pruitt’s show-cause ban, which is in effect until July 2029, the NCAA also handed down an automatic one year suspension for the former Tennessee head coach. That means if Pruitt is hired by a college football program, he automatically has to sit out a year — which makes it nearly impossible for a program to hire him.
Pruitt, despite his struggles as the head coach at Tennessee, has one of the best defensive minds in the sport. He should be part of college football and he should absolutely be on a sideline this fall. Especially when you consider that Pruitt’s essentially been banned from the sport until the end of the decade because of $60,000.
Doesn’t that seem a little absurd when NIL collectives are now throwing millions of dollars at players as a form of inducement?
If Pruitt and his staff would’ve committed these violations a couple of years later, no one in the sport even notices. The rules on paying players have been thrown out the window. Yet Pruitt is still exiled from the sport because of $60,000.
I mean, Georgia Bulldogs quarterback Jaden Rashada filed a lawsuit this week that alleges that Florida head coach Billy Napier promised his father $1 million upon signing with the Gators.
And the NCAA voted this week to pay players via their decision to accept the antitrust settlement in the House v. NCAA and related antitrust cases
