Jeremy Pruitt Syndication: The Knoxville News-Sentinel

Last week, former Tennessee Volunteers head football coach Jeremy Pruitt was hit with some brutal sanctions for a recent scandal when the NCAA hit him with a six-year show-cause penalty for his part in the recruiting scandal that implicated him in 200 individual infractions, including 18 of the highest-level violations.

He did defend himself against the accusations, but that defense ultimately only led to more criticism.

The case filings from the NCAA investigation revealed that Jeremy Pruitt brought up the high-profile police killings of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to defend his decision to give a player’s mother $300 in a Chick-fil-A bag.

“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.”

And Pruitt had no regrets about his decision, saying in the filings “I would do it again.”

[Knoxville News Sentinal]