Jeremy Pruitt Probably Right About the 2019 Dawgs
ATHENS - This is the best UGA team Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt has ever seen this early in the year.
And Pruitt would have a pretty good gauge on where Georgia is right now. A quick reminder: Pruitt was either at UGA or in the SEC as some sort of coach (quality control in some cases) every year since 2007 except the season he was at Florida State (2013).
“It’s probably the best Georgia team that I can ever remember at this point in time in the season,” he said Monday. He’s probably right - more on that in a minute.
Some of Pruitt’s take is coach speak. We do this in the SEC and beyond. After all, Kirby said out loud on Monday that Tennessee has “a good football team.”
That is not true.
I’ve seen Tennessee have “a good football team” since 2000, but not often. I can remember about 3.5 “good” Tennessee teams this century. I saw a lot more “good” Vol teams in the 1990s. But this ain’t the 1990s any more, sad for me to say. This is a new century, and in this decade no one has won the SEC East more than Georgia. In fact, its is the only East school to win the league this decade.
And Pruitt has been around for all of that and then some. In 2007, Matthew Stafford and those young Dawgs lost to Carolina and Tennessee early before catching fire late. The 2008, Alabama smashed UGA in late September. The 2011 Dawgs lost the opening two games of the year. 2013 UGA lost on the road to a top-ten Clemson team before taking out top-ten Carolina and top-ten LSU in Athens. Injuries caught up with that 2013 team the next game, which was in Knoxville.
In 2014 Georgia started the year with a blowout win over Clemson before a curious loss to Carolina on the road. The 2015 Dawgs were like someone pooping on a hot dog and trying to tell you it was a chili dog - no thanks.
2016 was a program in transition. In 2017, Georgia was finding itself with a true freshman quarterback along the way at the start of the year. Last season Georgia was great in the first three games of the year, but were sloppy at Missouri.
So Pruitt’s point should be well taken. The prime competitor for this 2019 team is the 2012 team - with Aaron Murray, Todd Gurley, Jarvis Jones and others. That team scored a pile of points early in the year (45, 41, 56, 48 and 41), but it allowed quite a few as well (23, 20, 20, 3 and 44).
We can’t know what the future will bring for this team, but we know the fate of the 2012 Dawgs. Still, that was a program more than a decade into its coach. Kirby brought UGA with a snap of winning it all in year two of his tenure, and Pruitt said Georgia is a place where you can succeed if you recruit to what you believe in.
“The program (Kirby) took over won 20 games in its previous two years. That helped. He had a very young football team that he inherited,” Pruitt said. “He has done a really nice job and has a really nice staff together. It is a place where you can have success. Those guys were used to winning and now he has been recruiting in his fourth year and all those guys that he has there he has recruited there. He has done a nice job of that – evaluating talent and going to get some of the best players in the country and coaching them up. In this day and time, you need to be good at the quarterback position, and he has a really good player there. They have recruited to their philosophy, and you can see it.”
Yes you can.