Jeremy Pruitt: “Let’s get ready to go get what we want.”

If you weren’t sold on Jeremy Pruitt before his introductory press conference, you probably are now. Pruitt gave Tennessee fans everything that they wanted to see — a tough, unpolished southerner ready to roll up his sleeves and get the job done.

If you haven’t seen it, I’d encourage you to watch the full thing. Here are the highlights.

• “I’m probably gonna be short here, so I can get to work.”
• “There was a time when this university was feared in the SEC, my goal is to get us back to that.”
• “I want us to have a team that nobody wants to play.”
• On where to start: “It starts in recruiting. We started that today, first of all by recruiting the student athletes on our football team. They’re hungry, they’re excited. They’re ready to get started.”
• On recruiting: “We’re starting in Tennessee, and we’re starting with Knoxville and working our way out. This is Tennessee. This is our state.”
• “We’re gonna coach our players how to introduce themselves — I think that’s important. We’re going to teach them where to sit in class, how to take notes.”
• “Your expectations aren’t near what mine are, aight? Because I expect to win every game.”
• “We want to be able to run the football. It starts with dominating the line of scrimmage. We want to create explosive plays in the pass game. That starts with the run game.”
• “We’re gonna create an aggressive style of defense. We’re not gonna sit back on our heels. We dictate what the (opposing) offense does. We’re gonna walk up to the line of scrimmage and challenge.”
• “You didn’t draft me, I chose to be here.”
• “Let’s stop talking about what we want — let’s go get it.”
• “Right now everyone is all excited. We’ve got a new football coach. My goal is to keep that excitement five years from now.”
• “Let’s get our hands out of our pockets, let’s roll our sleeves up and let’s get ready to get in the streets with everybody else in the SEC. If we want to get what we want, we have to outwork everyone else.
• “Let’s get ready to go get what we want, that’s it for me.”