Former Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt inadvertently helped create one of the SEC's fastest rising head coaches

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Former Tennessee Volunteers head coach Jeremy Pruitt inadvertently helped launch the career of one of college football’s fastest rising head coaches.

Former Tennessee Vols head coach Jeremy Pruitt doesn’t have an impressive coaching tree, but he did inadvertently help jumpstart the career of one of college football’s fastest rising coaches.

Pruitt, of course, was fired at Tennessee in early 2021 due to a massive recruiting scandal that left the program at rock bottom.

Current Auburn head coach Alex Golesh was part of Josh Heupel’s coaching staff that took over for Pruitt at Tennessee in January 2021.

Because the firing happened so late in the hiring cycle, Heupel was forced to give Golesh more responsibility than he otherwise would’ve.

“We walked into a really tough situation at the end of January,” said Golesh recently on See Ball Get Ball. “And I think in a lot of ways, that benefited me because a lot got thrown on me. Because we (Heupel and Golesh) did have a really good relationship, there was a lot of trust there, and [Heupel] trusted me to do a lot of things that I don’t know if we walked into a normal situation in December, if it would have been that way. But he certainly trusted me with a lot, and I don’t know if without that experience if I would have been ready to go run it myself so quickly.”

There were a lot of things that had to happen quickly when Heupel took over in late January 2021, and he had no choice but to delegate many of those responsibilities to Golesh.

And it’s interesting to hear Golesh say that he may not have been ready to be a head coach when he was (he left Tennessee to become the USF head coach after the 2022 season) if not for that experience in early 2021.

Based on those comments, it’s fair to suggest that if Pruitt doesn’t burn the Tennessee program to the ground in late 2020/early 2021, maybe Golesh isn’t the head coach at Auburn today.

This article was originally published on A to Z Sports. Read the full story here: Former Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt inadvertently helped create one of the SEC's fastest rising head coaches

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