What Jeremy Pruitt said after Tennessee’s first spring scrimmage on Saturday

Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt spoke with the media following his team’s first scrimmage of the spring on Saturday. As usual, Pruitt wasn’t interested in naming names. He did give us an idea of how the scrimmage went, however.

On the Running backs

“When the play is over, do we have the ball? That’s the most important thing to me,” Pruitt said of his running backs. He said he was pleased with the ball security today from his offense as a whole.

“One thing I did notice today was that our guys did not go down on first contact. That may be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. It could be a positive, but obviously the defense has to do a better job wrapping up.”

On Tackling

Speaking of tackling, Pruitt said that his defense has to get better in that area.

“One thing that jumps out to me is that we have to be a much better tackling team. Guys need a little bit better form to finish,” Pruitt said. “If you’re going to be a great tackling team, the easiest thing is you’ve got to get your feet in position. The most important thing when it comes to tackling is your feet. You got to be able to be in position to change direction with your eyes and chest up.”

On Body Language

“If I turned my head while the ball was snapped and missed the play, I could have told you what happened without looking at the down and distance, all based off of body language. That’s not a good thing. There will be times where things don’t go our way — how are we going to respond?”

On the “Pop”

While answering a question on physicality, Pruitt gave one of his best answers of the spring. “I’ve been to and coached in games where you can hear the ball being snapped. You can hear the pop. We ain’t hardly got the pop, yet. So we got to get a little more pop,” Pruitt said.