Last week, former Tennessee Volunteers football coach Jeremy Pruitt was given a six-year show-cause penalty for his part in a massive recruiting scandal that included 18 of the NCAA’s highest-level violations and 200 individual infractions. And he had a pretty wild defense for his actions that has just been revealed.
Jeremy Pruitt was found to have given a player’s mother $300 in a Chick-Fil-A bag. And in the case filings from the NCAA investigation, Pruitt used racial inequity and the high-profile killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to defend his actions.
“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 in the filings, according to 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.”
It’s a pretty wild defense, and it led to plenty of reactions on social media.
— ¡BUM CHILLUPS AKA SPENCER HALL! (@edsbs) July 17, 2023
college football is one of a kind https://t.co/55kyYwCzy6
— Mike Golic Jr (@mikegolicjr) July 17, 2023
I…don’t even know why I’m RTing this except that it just says so much, you don’t even know where to begin. https://t.co/rvAErtorhT
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) July 17, 2023
Naturally https://t.co/Ec3lRJhjnZ
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 17, 2023
I can’t wait for this documentary https://t.co/rXC9xSU8tc
— Ryan Phillips (@JournoRyan) July 17, 2023
Brand new sentence, not a single human in history has strung these words together before https://t.co/bQ1gqespJr
— rays baseball guy (@senor_andy) July 17, 2023
It’s safe to say that the wild defense did not work for Pruitt.
