I’ve never had the displeasure of trying to run a college football program at any level, let alone the SEC level, but I imagine it feels something like walking on a string between two large towers while also trying to herd cats.

Do I feel sorry for the men in those jobs? No. Almost never. They know that they sign up for, and they’re very well-compensated for their work, even when they fail. I’m not suggesting that anyone’s wealth makes them fair game for unfair criticism — you’re worth whatever the market says you’re worth — but SEC-head-coach money comes with SEC-head-coach stress. Those are the terms and conditions you agree to when you, your bosses and both sets of lawyers sign that dotted line.

The skills needed to succeed in that job are tough to find in any single person, and even those rare talents need good people around them.

I’ve never been truly inside a college football program, but I’ve been on the periphery of one for nearly two full decades, and I can tell you things never feel calm. Sometimes things seem relatively calm on the surface — there are benefits to having a large, talented public-relations team at your beck and call ‘round the clock — but they’re never actually calm. A good day is a day where you have to put out only a few fires. Things are always moving, and many of them are moving in unpleasant directions.

Drama is unavoidable. But there’s only one way to minimize it, and I think Jeremy Pruitt understands that.

Just be honest.

Being honest doesn’t always mean being nice. Sometimes the truth is awkward, inconvenient or just plain painful, and sometimes there’s no easy way to deliver it. But you can’t win in a sport like football at the SEC level without virtually everyone pulling in the same direction, and you can’t pull in the same direction without trust, and you can’t have trust until you establish a culture of honesty.

It took Tennessee football a lot longer than one year to put itself into the mess it was in when Pruitt took the job, and it was going to take a lot longer than one year to start putting it back together. Don’t read that only as “putting it back together,” but “start putting it back together.” This thing isn’t put back together yet. It’s just finally starting to get put back together. There’s a difference. A big difference.

Vols football coach Jeremy Pruitt

Just getting back to this point has been an accomplishment, though. And none of it would be possible without trust.

For the first time in a while, it feels like just about everyone in Anderson Training Center trusts just about everyone else. It never felt like that during the eras of Lane Kiffin, Derek Dooley and Butch Jones. It just didn’t. Jones always tried to make it seem like that culture existed during his tenure, but it never did, and anyone who tells you otherwise is some combination of naive, ignorant or deceitful. So many things in that era, down to the very foundation, were smoke and mirrors, and unfortunately even some good people got caught up in it.

Dealing with the egos and testosterone in a college football program is always difficult. You can’t control it. You have to manage it. But even managing it is a gargantuan challenge, especially when it’s been shattered to pieces before you arrive on the scene. Kiffin wasn’t on the job long enough to see how he would have handled it. I actually think he understood how to do most of it. But the parts he didn’t understand could have been dealbreakers. But ultimately we’ll never know, and that's a shame, because that guy has an impressive football brain and is actually fun to be around when no cameras are in the room. Many of the players who played for him at Tennessee love him to this day.

Dooley is an incredibly smart guy — one of the smartest guys I’ve come across in this business — but he thought he knew more about everything than everyone, and that’s never a good thing. When you’re making mistakes yourself but only noting the mistakes of others, you rub people the wrong way and tend to create a culture of negativity. And when you have a culture of negativity, you struggle to get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Jones, as noted above, built his program on a faulty foundation. Some players genuinely liked him, but a lot of them and their families really, really didn’t. Too many things were promised to too many people, and it became a big problem. I found it hard to trust the guy, which in and of itself is irrelevant to the larger picture. But a lot of people who actually matter didn’t trust the guy, either, and that was a legitimate issue. Everything felt manufactured. The catchy slogans wore out their welcome when it became apparent that there was no substance to support them.

In stepped Pruitt, and that started changing.

Pruitt is a man wholly without pretension, and he doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not. He’s a football coach’s football coach. He has experienced football at a championship level at three different programs, and he’s seen college programs operated with professional precision. He knows trust and accountability are as important as speed and strength.

I refer to college athletes as “kids” because … well … I think they’re kids. I was still a kid at that age, and most of them still seem like kids to me. Big kids, but still kids. But they’re not stupid. Most of them know when something or someone is real, and they know when something or someone is fake, and they tend to respond accordingly.

The way Pruitt speaks to his players and about his players impresses me. He’s just honest, but he always points to himself and his staff unless there’s no alternative.

Moments after Tennessee’s 17-13 win at Kentucky on Saturday night, Pruitt offered a case study in how you critique the mistakes of college football players.

He wasn’t afraid to say that some of Tennessee’s costly mistakes on both ends of the field came despite the players being given essentially perfect play calls.

Jones would have delivered a Shakespearian sonnet if his team had found a way to overcome as much adversity as Tennessee had to overcome Saturday night. Pruitt spent one sentence praising his team for its resiliency and then spent more than five minutes and 750 words describing all the dumb things his team did to put itself in that position.

“We have a chance to end the game and we fumble the football,” Pruitt said. “Got a really good play called, ball is right in our stomach there and we drop the football. So we give ‘em an opportunity there. Then it’s four-down territory, again, twice in that drive. We can’t be in a better play call, and they gain 9 yards.

"So I don’t know what we need to call. We have to execute at a higher level, I can tell you that.”

Then came this, though.

“We have to coach them better so we do execute at a higher level,” Pruitt added.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is accountability. Rather than focus solely on the players making obvious mistakes, Pruitt notes — accurately — that ultimately he and his staff are responsible for the execution of the call, too. He goes out of his way to mention that time and time again, even when he doesn’t necessarily need to.

Who’s ultimately responsible for this? It’s Pruitt, the man making more than $4 million per year to do his job. And he knows that. Everything a player does is something he’s either coached or allowed to do.

Accountability within the Tennessee football program now starts at the top again, and players respond to that. When players have been asked to change positions, they’ve continued working hard. When players have been benched, they’ve continued working hard. When players have been embarrassed on Saturdays, they’ve continued working hard.

Look at them now.

Tennessee still isn’t a good football team, but it’s a rapidly improving football team, and it’s a team that’s learning how to win even when it’s nowhere near its best. That starts at the top.

Players considered lost causes by many people around the program — myself included — have been salvaged. That starts at the top. Junior quarterback Jarrett Guarantano and senior safety Nigel Warrior might be the shiniest examples of that, but they're far from the only ones. This staff has squeezed juice out of several players I never expected to see succeed consistently at the SEC level. That’s a credit to those players, first and foremost, but it’s also a credit to the coaches who refused to give up on them. It’s a credit to the culture they’re building.

Being 5-5 at Tennessee is never a great look, but less than a couple of months ago many of us were seriously discussing the possibility of this being the worst team in program history. This was a 1-4 team staring down the barrel of a potential two- to four-win season. Now it’s a 5-5 team with a puncher’s chance of playing in a January bowl game.

Pruitt isn’t acting like the Vols have arrived, though. He keeps insisting they haven’t come close to playing the best they can play, and that they haven’t come close to playing anything resembling a complete game. He let his players celebrate wildly after beating Mississippi State and South Carolina, and rightfully so, but he didn’t join their Lambeau Leaps into the student section. He’s seen and coached much better football, and he won’t be happy until he sees it again. Even then, he won’t be satisfied. That’s not how he’s wired. But he’ll let the kids be kids, and he should. These kids haven’t won enough to be chastised for celebrating success in any game, let alone an SEC game. Let them enjoy it for a minute, but then remind them how much better they’ll have to play if they want to win bigger games down the road. But then remind them again that it’s your job to coach them better.

I don’t know if Jeremy Pruitt will make Tennessee look like Tennessee again, but he’s at least managed to make Tennessee stop looking like Vanderbilt. That’s a start, and it makes me think better days are possible. Pruitt has put in place a genuine foundation on which this program has the chance to grow, and that foundation was started in the simplest of ways. He’s been honest and accountable.