KNOXVILLE – When Tennessee travels to Charlotte, N.C., to play football against West Virginia at the Carolina Panthers’ Bank of America Stadium on Sept. 1, Jeremy Pruitt doesn’t want it to be the first time his team experiences a new pregame routine.
He also wants to have a pretty good idea of who the Volunteers’ best competitors are.
For those reasons, the first-year Tennessee head coach is plotting the April 21 spring game at Neyland Stadium to mimic a real football game.
“To me, when you have the Orange and White game, you add the element when you create a game-like atmosphere,” Pruitt said. “There’s a little more excitement, a little more anxiety, a little more pressure, butterflies. Some guys perform better in those situations; some guys perform worse. We need to find out who those guys are.”
The spring game Pruitt is planning is shaping up to have a different feel than the spring games did under Butch Jones. Those involved a complicated scoring system and other drills such as the “Circle of Life” and a throwing competition for quarterbacks.