Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt

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Phillip Fulmer became Tennessee’s athletic director on Dec. 1, 2018, but the Hall of Fame football coach remained in Knoxville and remained connected to the Vols after being forced out as coach after the 2008 season.

Fulmer’s presence in the football complex was commonplace throughout the Derek Dooley and Butch Jones eras, and several of his closest friends are still coaching.

In other words, Fulmer knew many of the players Tennessee had been recruiting.

And put simply, Fulmer believes Tennessee is recruiting at another level under new head coach Jeremy Pruitt.

The dying days of the Jones era and the circus of a search to replace him — a search that started and ended with different athletic directors pulling the strings — caused Tennessee to tumble down the recruiting rankings, but Pruitt and his staff dealt with those and other distractions and still managed to push the Vols back up to the No. 19 spot nationally as of Thursday morning. And considering the number of prospects still considering the Vols heading into next week’s traditional National Signing Day, they might continue their climb up the charts.

Fulmer said the number of high-caliber prospects considering Tennessee has tripled under Pruitt’s watch, and that it took him just two days to notice the difference.

“Oh, he has a plan. He has a plan,” Fulmer said in an exclusive interview with GoVols247. “He’s been around some really good coaches at really good places. He knows what it’s supposed to look like. He kind of followed up with his commitment to me as to who he thought he could bring with him. That’s who showed up, which was good.

“He showed he can turn recruiting around in a hurry. We tripled our recruiting board in like two days, with that staff — and not people that we were looking at, but people that were looking at us. That made a big difference. Unfortunately we had the early signing period. I’d like to have had another couple weeks with that, or it could have been really good.

Tennessee athletic director Phillip Fulmer

"But we got recruiting turned, and turned quickly, and hopefully we can finish strong here. That’s the foundation of winning, is having the good players here.”

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The early signing period was only half of the only potential problem for Pruitt’s first recruiting class at Tennessee. Pruitt opting to finish his tenure as Alabama’s defensive coordinator during the Crimson Tide’s march to another national championship cut at even bigger hole into the time Tennessee’s new coach had to stabilize the recruiting situation in the early signing period.

Pruitt’s ability to navigate that minefield and have success on two fronts was, as Fulmer said, the best possible outcome.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Fulmer said. “I mean, that was part of the selection process. If kids felt the energy from him — the same energy that I felt — then we were going to get in on more good players. He brings it. He brings that energy. He does it every day.”

Fulmer took the unusual-for-an-athletic-director step of getting NCAA-certified to recruit on the road during Pruitt’s two-jobs-in-two-cities period, and he even went on the road with Pruitt a couple of times. And he claimed to love every bit of what he saw.

“I was a knot on the log there,” Fulmer said. “He was the focal point. He handled the room. When he sat in the home, he was great with the mom and dad and the kid.”

Fulmer knew about Pruitt’s reputation as an elite recruiter. He got excited when watching Pruitt get up “on the edge of his chair” with a “nervous twitch in his leg” when the two talked recruiting during the interview process. He was convinced it would work. But the benefit of seeing Pruitt recruit in person gave Fulmer instant gratification about his first hire.

“Peace of mind — yeah, that’s a good way to put it,” Fulmer said. “You’re thinking, ‘Hey, this is good.’ And his staff is very similar.”

More content from GoVols247’s exclusive interview with Fulmer will be posted on the site in the coming days, and audio from the interview will be played on the GoVols247 Podcast.

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Contact Wes Rucker by email at wes.rucker@cbsinteractive.com or ON TWITTER, or FOLLOW GOVOLS247 ON FACEBOOK.