Wiedmer: Thompson’s troubles are last thing football Vols needed to deal with

KNOXVILLE – Could a pair of fake eyelashes derail an entire University of Tennessee football season?

It’s doubtful. After all, this wasn’t junior quarterback Jarrett Guarantano whom second-year coach Jeremy Pruitt suspended indefinitely on Monday. It was sophomore defensive back Bryce Thompson, who got himself arrested Saturday night following a heated argument with his longtime girlfriend, who was rather understandably upset after finding another girl’s fake eyelashes in his dorm room.

Shouting reportedly ensued. A metal gate of some sort was damaged. Witnesses supposedly heard Thompson tell the young woman that he would “slap the (blank) out of you” and “shoot up the school.”

On a scale of 1 to 10 regarding things you should never say these days, Thompson rang up 20 points on those two phrases alone, assuming he actually shouted both of those repugnant remarks.

To be fair, Thompson has denied that any physical contact took place between the two or that he made any verbal threats toward her or anyone else.

And if he’s telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he’ll probably get little more than a stern talking to from a judge and 40 or so hours of community service when he appears in Knoxville County General Sessions Court on Sept. 3, which would mean the 2018 Freshman All-American could be back on the field by the Florida game on Sept. 21.

But whatever the outcome for Thompson following his Sunday morning release on $3,000 bond, this was the last thing a program struggling mightily to regain past glory needed a week before its season opener against overmatched Georgia State.

As Pruitt said in a very brief prepared statement Monday morning: “Bryce Thompson is suspended indefinitely while the process continues. We hold our student-athletes to a high standard. The safety of all students is our first priority here at Tennessee.”

Asked to expand on the situation at a game-week news conference later in the day, Pruitt wisely declined, saying only, “I released a statement today, and that’s all we’re going to talk about for right now. We’re going to focus on this game, and for us, that’s what we can focus on.”

The Voluteers have had more than enough football-only woes to focus on in recent years thanks to poor coaching hires, a ridiculous run of injuries and a dip in talent severe enough that not a single UT player was selected in the 2019 NFL draft.

As the football Vols have painfully proven time and again the last decade, unless you can hire Nick Saban as your football coach, it’s a lot more difficult to rebuild a once-proud football program than to fix any other sport. The numbers needed to succeed in a conference such as the Southeastern are just too daunting for a quick fix.

Every wrong move seems to move you four steps backward instead of two. Merely consider that under the coach who preceded Pruitt – Butch Jones – the Vols won nine of 16 SEC games during 2015 and 2016 combined yet won no conference contests in the injury-riddled 2017 season.

Now comes Pruitt’s second year. Having gone 2-6 in the SEC a year ago – though both of those victories came against ranked opponents in Auburn and Kentucky – he now hopes to improve last season’s 5-7 overall record to earn a bowl bid this time around.

“We’ve had a really good camp,” Pruitt said. “We’ve had really good leadership out of our seniors, and we have lots of new guys, lots of unknowns, and that’s the excitement about college football. We have a lot of guys that came here because they felt like they had the opportunity to play early at a big-time program, and a lot of them have put themselves in position to do that. So we’re excited about Saturday and having an opportunity to get this thing going.”

The suspension of Thompson shouldn’t derail that. It might even strengthen the resolve and discipline of all those Big Orange players who remain. It should certainly give them pause to consider their future behavior regarding a member of the opposite sex, which is always a good thing.

But regardless of how this ultimately plays out, no coach wants even a sliver of the focus entering the season opener to be on a misdemeanor domestic assault charge regarding one of his top returning players.

Or as Pruitt noted Monday: “To me, one of the most important things is, when things are going good they have a little pep in their step. Well, things don’t always go the right way. One of the most important things is how we’re going to handle adversity as a team.”

Of equal importance, if not greater, is how the Vols handle their relationships with the opposite sex moving forward. If a pair of fake eyelashes improves that dynamic, the adversity brought on by Thompson’s poor decisions this past weekend will be a powerful positive rather than a notable negative.

If it doesn’t, wins and losses won’t be the only thing that could one day jeopardize Pruitt’s job.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.