KNOXVILLE – Tennessee has started the 2019 season with a pair of home losses to Georgia State and BYU.

The 0-2 start follows two losses from the closure of last season with the Vols needing one victory in becoming bowl eligible, finishing the 2018 campaign with a 5-7 record and missing out on 15 additional practices.

Second-year head coach Jeremy Pruitt was hired by second-year UT athletics director Phillip Fulmer to rebuild the Tennessee football program back to a championship contender.

Johnny Majors discussed starting his Tennessee head coaching tenure 4-9-1 through his first 14 games, a mark that is similar to Pruitt’s 5-9 record to kickoff his Tennessee career.

“You don’t know really what you are facing until you get there and look at the program to begin to work on it,” Majors told Vols Wire of rebuilding a program.

Majors served as Tennessee’s head coach for 16 seasons (1977-92), winning three SEC championships and compiling a 116–62–8 record.

He was also the head coach for Iowa State (1968-72) and Pittsburgh (1973-76) before returning to Tennessee – his alma mater where he finished runner-up in the Heisman Trophy balloting in 1956.

Majors says each head coaching position was different with Iowa State being a program that was not accustomed to winning, while Pittsburgh was a school that attracted quick results and Tennessee being a place that took time to get back to its championship ways.

“You sometimes have a pretty good idea what it could be like because my first head coaching job at Iowa State was called a coaching graveyard,” Majors said.

At Pittsburgh, Majors says “we rebuilt the program overnight there.”

“We turned them around,” Majors said of being Pittsburgh’s head coach that resulted in winning the 1976 national championship. “I took eight coaches with me from Iowa State to Pittsburgh and they knew the territories we had been recruiting. They knew our system and it really helped us get off to a good start at winning. They had experience of what I wanted to get done.”

At Tennessee, it took time for the former Vol.

Majors says “it was a tough decision to leave a great program we had at Pittsburgh,” but he returned to his alma mater that did not win any conference championships under the previous head coach Bill Battle (1970-76).

“We struggled a couple of years,” Majors said of his head coaching tenure at Tennessee. “We needed talent and we were short on talent. I brought some of my coaches with me. It was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. We scrambled around and did some rebuilding.

“Some people left the squad that didn’t want to go through the procedures of what we were used to teaching fundamentals and toughness – hard-nosed football. It took us a couple of years to recruit and we rebuilt it. The first year we were 4-7, 5-5-1 the second year, but the third year we were 7-5. We then started building an outstanding program and was here 16 years.”

Majors won the Southeastern Conference championship in 1985, 1989 and in 1990 at Tennessee.