Let me open the doors to the theater of the absurd, where everyone gets their day in court.
Or in this case, their 15 minutes of infamy.
Jeremy Pruitt was the football coach at Tennessee not long ago, and a failed one at that. While there’s no shame in losing, there’s abject humiliation in blaming others.
Especially when you were handing out bags of cash to recruits.
But here we are, and because our magnificent judicial system allows everyone to be heard – and every attorney to claim anything in an initial filing, true or not – Pruitt is suing the NCAA for $100 million, claiming it conspired with Tennessee to run him out of his job and college football.
Why, you ask? So Tennessee didn’t have to pay his $12.8 million buyout after firing him for cause in January of 2021.
There’s one teeny-weeny problem with this argument: the university paid nearly $9 million in fines to the NCAA two years later, as part of a five-year probation for violations committed by Pruitt and his staff. Or a difference of about $4 million.
Don’t kid yourself, $4 million is walkin’ around money in the high stakes world of hiring and firing coaches in the SEC. This had nothing do with buyouts, and everything to do with a brazenly stupid system of paying players — before NIL changed the rules.
You want stupid? Let me introduce stupid. Among the 18 alleged Level I violations (the most severe in the NCAA rulebook) and more than 200 individual violations committed by Pruitt and his staff, was Pruitt and his wife, Casey, handing out cash to players totaling $60,000.
“Hey babe, we really need that linebacker. Can you hightail it over to Johnson City and give his momma a few stacks in a Chick-fil-A bag?”
Pruitt was given a six-year show cause penalty by the NCAA, and Tennessee was placed probation, lost 28 scholarships and paid the largest fine in NCAA history. I may be going way out on a limb here, but if the NCAA and Tennessee conspired against Pruitt, what exactly did Tennessee receive for doing the NCAA’s bidding?
In Pruitt’s filing, a rambling mishmash of deflection, he says Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman told him, “We know you haven’t done anything wrong.” I’m sure Pruitt’s attorneys have audio proof, or second-hand knowledge from someone else in the room, to back up that claim. Because why else would it be in the filing?
No attorney would ever, you know, write anything in an initial pleading that isn’t true.
Meanwhile, back at the nuthouse, the filing also claims that Pruitt, when he was hired in December of 2017, found out about a pay-for-play scheme and went to then-athletic director Phil Fulmer with the appalling news. Fulmer, the filing sates, told Pruitt “he would handle it.”
Apparently over the next three seasons – and I know this is hard to imagine – someone strong-armed squeaky clean Pruitt to continue flouting NCAA rules by handing out cash to players. Among the other 200-plus violations.
Must have been that mean Tennessee administration. The same administration that refused to pay his $12.8 million buyout after he lost 19 of 35 career games, and turned the program into Vanderbilt (sorry, Diego).
The same administration that clearly isn’t afraid of buyouts, having given walkaway money to Butch Jones ($8.2 million) and Derek Dooley ($5 million) prior to the Pruitt era.
Must have been the Tennessee chancellor, and the Tennessee athletic director who knew there was a history of cheating, and looked the other way for everyone else. Just not Pruitt.
Must have been the NCAA, which haphazardly decides who and what to investigate, and did so this time only by invitation of a member institution. But it backfired on Tennessee, baby, and they got theirs when the NCAA – even though it was conspiring with Tennessee – fined the university $9 million.
This might be the stupidest stupid in the history of stupid.
And because the NCAA and Tennessee conspired against this elite football coach, the filing states, Pruitt lost wages and other compensation, and suffers from emotional distress and mental anguish. He also sustained damage to his reputation.
For the love of all things holy, his reputation, man.
For all of this, and anything inadvertently omitted from the initial, wildly truthful filing, Jeremy Pruitt wants 100 large. But is willing to “allow a jury” to determine the damages.
Hopefully the jury isn’t in on the conspiracy, too.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.
