What Jeremy Pruitt said after day one of the Early Signing Period

On if not having an offensive coordinator hurt recruiting...

“I think nowadays, coaches, they change a lot. You’re usually recruiting to the head football coach. There was never an issue there. We put Shelton Felton on the road. Shelton’s a guy that was a high school coach in the state of Georgia, he’s done it before — he was at UTC. So he’s got experience and we thought that was a really good fit.”

On this group’s chance to play early...

“To play as a true freshman, you’ve got to have some maturity. I think it helps that sometimes guys are mid-year. We’ve got I think 12 guys coming in mid-year. We also really only played five seniors at the end of the year. We’ve got a lot of guys coming back. What I think we’re going to have is lots of competition, lots of opportunity.”

On the QB situation...

“We’ll have three guys this spring. We’ll have Jarrett, JT and Brian. We’ll have really good competition. Obviously, Jarrett has a lot more experience than those guys, but I think those guys are really good competitors. They have really good arm strength. They have all the attributes that you’re looking for in a quarterback.”

On remaining needs...

“There’s still certain areas of our football team that we just need more numbers, especially up front. We’ll look to take another skill player on defense, another skill player on offense — maybe a couple of more on offense. We can’t have enough big men, so we would take some big men if we could get them.”

On how the next month will be spent...

“With 17 spots, we’ve obviously still got a few spots to fill. Signing day goes all the way through Friday, so there’s other guys that’ll be out there that could possibly land here. You have a really good idea of where you’re at when you go out on the 11th, so everyone is going to start junior recruiting for the 2020 class. I think with the recruiting calendar, you have to do that.”

On the offensive coordinator search...

“I’d rather talk about recruiting right now. The offensive coordinator sometimes is overrated. There’s some of these teams that it doesn’t matter who the offensive coordinator is, based off talent or lack there of. The most important thing right now is recruiting. We’ll worry about that later.”

On recruiting the state of Georgia...

“We’re going to look for the best players. We’re going to start at home base, which is here in Knoxville and here in the state of Tennessee. We’ve tried to do that and we’re going to continue to do that. Then you go to your neighboring states, just kind of a common sense approach. You know you’ve got Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky — just kind of working your way out. I think that’s the way you do it.”