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.
And that shouldn't be the case.
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.
From ESPN : The settlement terms state the NCAA will provide more than $2.7 billion to former athletes over the next decade for back damages related to the association's name, image and likeness restrictions, according to sources. The conferences also agreed to create a forward-looking system that will allow schools to pay roughly $20 million per year in permissive revenue sharing to athletes. Those direct payments, an unprecedented paradigm shift in college sports, would likely begin in fall 2025.
College football has completely shifted over the last couple of years from under-the-table payments and cash being slipped into players' pockets in secret to everything being out in the open.
The Heisman Trust even gave former USC running back Reggie Bush his Heisman Trophy back (Bush was alleged to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in impermissible benefits).
And Pruitt still can't coach in college football.
What sense does it make to continue to keep Pruitt away from the sport?
Pruitt made some mistakes during his time at Tennessee. But perhaps his biggest mistake was not being more secretive. After all, you're a fool if you think Pruitt's $60,000 in impermissible benefits was a unique situation in college football. The only difference between Pruitt and (most of) the rest of the head coaches in the sport is that Pruitt (and/or his staff) got caught. And now he has to sit out for most of the decade while his former counterparts get to hand out stacks of cash while the NCAA reluctantly nods its head in approval.
Related: National analyst has absurd reason for labeling Tennessee Vols QB Nico Iamaleava as 'overrated'
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