No college football coach in the history of the sport may be tougher to satisfy than Alabama's Nick Saban.
(OK, so he did seem fairly satisfied a few minutes after the Crimson Tide stunned Georgia in overtime to win the national championship in January, even proclaiming, "I've never been happier in my life." Hopefully, for the sake of his family, he meant to say, "I've never been happier in my coaching life," but that joy was an overwhelming outlier.)
Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt reacts during the Orange and White spring game at Neyland Stadium on Saturday, April 21, 2018 in Knoxville, Tenn.Most of the time, Saban comes across as the kind of guy who could win a $500 million Powerball and complain about the taxes he'll owe.
That said, he might soon have some company in the grumpy department in the person of his former defensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt, who just wrapped up his first spring as head coach at Tennessee. You could even label Pruitt "Saban Lite," though there was certainly nothing lighthearted about his news conference after the Volunteers' Orange and White spring game Saturday in Knoxville.
Whether it was his view of some of the players' effort: "After 15 days, to me, for some of the guys, that's disappointing - very disappointing."
Or nobody on defense - especially the second-team defense - whipping the man across from him: "If everybody on offense wins, it's going to be a long year."
Or his prediction that the players who will join the program this summer are better than the ones on the roster: "The good thing is in a couple of weeks we'll have a bunch of guys that aren't on the injury report anymore. We'll have 14 new guys here and maybe more. Some of these guys that don't want to do it and don't want to do it right all the time, they'll just be watching."
Whatever his comments, they were all pretty negative regarding most of the current players.
And maybe that's as it should be. Maybe that's how he truly views those student-athletes who played in front of an announced crowd of 65,098. Or maybe that's how he wants those players to perceive their futures because in today's world of big-time college athletics, a player who believes his coach isn't pleased with him is likely to either transfer or work a whole lot harder, and Pruitt would probably gladly embrace either of those options.
But it was something he said about that announced crowd of 65,098 that may ruffle a few feathers among both the fans and the UT administration, including athletic director Phillip Fulmer.
After praising the Vol Walk as "spectacular," Pruitt said of the crowd in general: "The ones that were here, I'm proud they were here. They're fired up and ready to get going. Then there were some people that wasn't here that had legitimate reasons they couldn't be here, all right. Then there were some people that wasn't here that, why wasn't they here? It's kind of like our football team. I think we all need to look in the mirror and see who we want to be."
What Tennessee's fans want the program to be is a national champion. Same as always. The Vols may have won all of one natty - the one from the 1998 season, with Fulmer their coach - over the past 66 years, but the Big Orange Nation often views itself as Alabama, even as it keeps falling further behind Saban and the Tide.
Nevertheless, for 65,000 people to show up to watch a spring game after a 4-8 season is pretty stout support. Especially when a convergence of events on campus (including Cirque du Soleil in Thompson-Boling Arena and a baseball game against Texas A&M) made parking a nightmare around the time of the 2 p.m. kickoff.
Maybe it didn't match the spring game attendance recorded at Pruitt's previous two coaching stops on Saturday - Alabama (74,732) and Georgia (82,184) - but the Vols didn't exactly match the performances of Bama and the Bulldogs last season, either.
Point is, the Vols are long removed from the days Gen. Robert Neyland went 12-5-2 against Alabama, including 5-0-2 versus Bear Bryant when he was at Kentucky. The earth hasn't shaken at Neyland Stadium since Arkansas fumbled and Travis Henry roared into the end zone a few plays later to send the Vols to the first BCS title game.
At least for the next season or two, the expectation level needs to be ratcheted down a bit, and that includes Pruitt.
This past Thursday, while otherwise praising him, Fulmer said of his new football coach: "He's a good communicator. He's not a great communicator if he doesn't get what he wants, but then you work through all that."
Pruitt told the media what he wanted from the fans a day or two before the spring game when he said of the crowd he'd like to see: "I expect our fan base to be there. Obviously, it helps in recruiting when you look and you see 102,000 people for a spring game. That sends a message to recruits about how important spring football is at Tennessee, and how much football is important in general."
Instead, he got a highly respectable announced crowd of 65,098, which brings me to something else Pruitt noted about the game.
"You look at one day's work out there," he said, "that's not really a true indication of how spring actually went."
Nor is looking at one spring game's crowd a true indication of the Big Orange Nation's passion for its football program.
For its new coach to believe otherwise is disappointing. Very disappointing.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.