College football coach says he broke NCAA rules because he felt bad about George Floyd

As we learn what punishment Tennessee has received over its NCAA violations, former coach Jeremy Pruitt tries to explain some of the motivation behind it

Disgraced college football coach Jeremy Pruitt says that he committed numerous NCAA violations during his controversial tenure leading the Tennessee Volunteers program because he felt bad about George Floyd, the man whose death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020 ignited widespread protests and riots across the country.

Pruitt cited the racial situation in the country after Floyd's death as a motivating factor in why he wanted to help players in violation of NCAA rules.

"... 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 documents obtained by Knoxville (Tenn.) News.

"[Its] 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?" he added.

Whatever feelings Pruitt may have had about the string of killings across the country, or about the general state of race relations in America dating back centuries, they hardly have any direct relationship to his flagrantly breaking hundreds of NCAA rules when it came to directly paying players bags full of cash.

And doubtless there will be some who find it disrespectful that Pruitt used the death of those people in an effort to explain why he broke those rules.

NCAA investigators clearly didn't give any weight to his explanation: Tennessee was fined $8 million, forced to vacate wins from Pruitt's tenure, lost 28 scholarships over five years, and Pruitt himself was slapped with a six-year show-cause penalty as a result of the over 200 violations he committed on Rocky Top.

(KN)

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