Former Tennessee Volunteers coach Jeremy Pruitt was slammed by the NCAA last week with a six-year show-cause penalty stemming from a recruiting scandal that included 18 of the highest-level infractions under NCAA rules plus 200 individual infractions. And now he says the deaths of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery motivated him to do it.
In documents pertaining to the NCAA investigation, Pruitt cited the deaths of several prominent young black people as motivating factors in why he gave the mother of a black player $300 tucked inside a Chick-Fil-A bag.
Head coach Jeremy Pruitt of the Tennessee Volunteers shouts to his players during the second quarter of the game against the Vanderbilt Commodores at Neyland Stadium on November 30, 2019, in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Silas Walker/Getty Images)
“Then you throw in George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, okay, so you sit there as a white man and you see all of this going on and you can see these kids suffering,” Pruitt said, according to documents via the Knoxville New Sentinel. “… (It’s) pitiful when you sit in a room and you hear grown men, and I’m talking about our coaches too, when they talk about growing up and the circumstances that they’ve been under, because it’s hard for a white man to understand, right.”
Police officers guarding the Trump International Hotel & Tower hold back protesters on May 30, 2020, during a rally and march to remember the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Even after having his career irrevocably harmed and possibly ruined due to the punishments meted out to him, Pruitt stressed he not only doesn’t regret his recruiting infractions, he would do them again.
“I would do it again because I don’t think it’s breaking the rules (based on what would’ve been available through UT’s Student Assistance Fund if not for the pandemic),” Pruitt said. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve got little kids, and I hope one of these days when I’m dead and gone that somebody does the right thing for them.”