Brief confusion quickly gave way to a delightful joke and earnest well-wishes.

Jeremy Pruitt is the defensive coordinator for Alabama. He’s reportedly emerged as a candidate for Mississippi State’s head coaching job, now that Dan Mullen’s gone to Florida. Pruitt’s Twitter account is @CoachJPruitt, where he has nearly 30,000 followers.

Jeremy Pruitt is not the only Jeremy Pruitt.

Another Jeremy Pruitt is a 30-year-old country club sous chef from Columbus, Ohio, he told SB Nation. He now lives in Dayton and is a huge Ohio State fan. He is not a football coach. His Twitter account is @jgroove1, where he had just over 500 followers as of 10 p.m. ET Monday.

Here are the two Jeremy Pruitts, just so everyone’s clear:

Football coach Jeremy Pruitt (left) and sous chef Jeremy Pruitt (right).

Getty, Jeremy Pruitt

There may have been brief confusion between the two Pruitts on Monday.

Monday evening, a handful of Mississippi State fans started tweeting at Sous Chef Jeremy Pruitt, urging him to come to Starkville.

They were looking for Football Coach Jeremy Pruitt but sent their solicitations to Chef Pruitt instead, or they were just kidding around.

Here’s the tweet that started it all, as best I can tell. I think it was unironic, maybe:

Chef Pruitt immediately recognized what was going on.

Chef Pruitt knows football well, so he’d know who Coach Pruitt is anyway. But he’s been familiar with Pruitt for years, he told me, because he used to watch that MTV show Two-A-Days.

You remember Two-A-Days, surely. It followed an elite high school football team from Hoover, Ala., in 2006. The defensive coordinator on that team? Coach Jeremy Pruitt. During one episode, Coach Pruitt seemed to have no idea what asparagus was.

There were only a few tweets that seemed to indicate genuine confusion. Even the first account to tweet at Chef Pruitt about the MSU job seemed to get the joke shortly thereafter, so I have no idea how many people were truly confused.

There was one enjoyable exchange between Chef Pruitt, a Bama fan, and Bama beat writer Cecil Hurts of the Tuscaloosa News, who’d retweeted Chef Pruitt’s tweet.

And:

Any confusion gave way to this quickly becoming a fun gag.

The first response to Chef Pruitt’s note that he’d been getting tweeted at:

Tweets started to pour in from MSU fans all over.

Some invites to the Florida-MSU game next year, when Mullen returns to town:

He got a bunch of offers for MSU gear.

There are scores more tweets like this. At least many dozen, and climbing toward the hundreds as the night got older.

Pretty much everyone except this one guy had a blast with this:

Chef Pruitt was deeply appreciative of all the Starkville love.

He did the only appropriate thing and made this his Twitter bio:

He says MSU will henceforth be a close second behind Ohio State in his heart.

This is now one of my favorite college football stories of the year.

Mississippi State must hire Jeremy Pruitt the Football Coach and also bring in Jeremy Pruitt the Sous Chef as an honorary captain for the first game of the 2018 season.