How coach Heupel differs from Pruitt
One could be excused for thinking Tennessee offensive coordinator Alex Golesh's comment sounded like a dig at Jeremy Pruitt, even if he didn't intend for it to be.
“I think it's really hard to evaluate guys if you move them around a whole bunch,” Golesh said last week.
Don't tell that to Pruitt. The former Vols football coach wasn't shy about shuffling players from spot to spot. The regular rearrangements didn't result in many breakthroughs.
The old football adage says that if you have two quarterbacks, it actually means you have none.
In the same vein: If a player toggles among three positions, that player probably isn't particularly good at any of them. Moreover, if you play three positions, you don't get much chance to develop at any of them.
It's notable that new coach Josh Heupel kept Dee Beckwith at running back after Beckwith was an offensive journeyman during a freshman season beset by injury.
Asked last week which players changed positions after last season, Heupel offered no examples.
"Our roster for the most part has stayed status quo as far as their homes and where they're starting out," Heupel said.
Beckwith began the 2020 preseason splitting his time between wide receiver and tight end. At 6-foot-5, 230 pounds, those positions seemed to suit his body type.
But injuries to other personnel prompted Pruitt's staff to move Beckwith to running back, where he finished the season. He debuted in December and totaled three carries for 25 yards.
Heupel plans to keep Beckwith there, at least for now. If Beckwith stays put, he'll aid a position headlined by returner Jabari Small and highly touted juniorcollege transfer Tiyon Evans.
Pruitt's tinkering didn't start or end with Beckwith.
Aaron Beasley played safety, running back and linebacker throughout the Pruitt era. Keeping track of whether Kingston Harris was practicing on the offensive or defensive line felt like a part-time job.
Princeton Fant spent 2017 redshirting as a tight end while Butch Jones was the coach. After Pruitt arrived, Fant moved from tight end to running back to linebacker to running back to tight end.
Jeremy Banks rushed for 185 yards during his 2018 freshman season, but when the Vols ran thin on linebacker depth that year, Pruitt converted Banks to linebacker, touting his potential there.
Banks remains a linebacker, where he struggled as a backup last season.
During Quavaris Crouch's freshman season, he split time between outside linebacker, inside linebacker and running back. Nothing challenging about that, right?
At least one success story emerged from Pruitt's position shuffles. He flipped Latrell Bumphus, a tight end under Jones, to defensive line. Bumphus became a serviceable member of the defensive line rotation the past two seasons.
Pruitt explained his rationale for preseason position tinkering in April 2018.
“If we lose two or three guys at a certain position, and we need to make some moves to figure out the best way and maybe have to change who we are, then we want to be able to do that,” Pruitt said then. “We don't want October or November to be the first time they've ever done it. We want to give them a little bit of background.”
Before Pruitt joined the college coaching ranks, he spent several years coaching on high school staffs. In high school, if a team's starting quarterback goes down to injury, a coach might shift the team's most talented player to quarterback to hold down the fort.
But a couple of issues emerged in Pruitt's deployment of that musical chairs strategy at Tennessee: This isn't high school ball, despite the Vols' performance during the Pruitt era sometimes suggesting otherwise, and Pruitt wasn't using his most talented players to plug gaps. Rather, he shuffled reserves instead of keeping them in place and allowing them to develop.
That's not to say a coach shouldn't stockpile talented prospects even if it's unclear what position they might play in college. Alontae Taylor and Bryce Thompson were offensive standouts in high school who signed as part of Pruitt's first signing class. They became cornerbacks at Tennessee and started as freshmen.
A coach's task is to recruit talented players, identify where to best use them and develop them. Step 3 is made difficult if a player cannot get comfortable at a position.
Is Beckwith bound to become a productive running back? Too soon to know, but it sounds like, with this staff, he might stay there long enough to find out.