Ever heard of Malone University?

I hadn’t, either.

Malone is a private Evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Canton, Ohio. It has an enrollment of 1,332, which is smaller than many of the high schools some of you attended. Its nickname is the Pioneers. It plays NCAA Division II football.

One of those Malone football players was invited to participate in this year’s NFL Scouting Combine.

And Malone wasn’t alone.

The University of Charleston — no, not the sexy Charleston; the one in West Virginia — had a player invited to this year’s NFL Combine. So did Sioux Falls. So did Washburn. Before sitting down to research this story, I didn’t know that any of those colleges existed, let alone played football.

But wait, there’s more.

Of course there’s more. There were 338 players invited to the NFL Combine.

Vols football coach Jeremy Pruitt

Morgan State. Northwestern State. Northern Arizona. Western Illinois. Elon. North Carolina A&T. Northern Colorado. Alabama State. All of those programs were mentioned on the combine's official invite list.

South Dakota State — which isn’t even the best Dakota State that plays college football — had a player invited to the combine. The superior Dakota State — North Dakota State — also had a player invited to the combine.

Ferris State had a player invited to this year’s NFL Combine.

You know who didn’t, though? The mighty Tennessee Volunteers, who were so badly mismanaged by a Ferris State graduate — Butch Jones — that they somehow, some way didn’t have a single player invited to the annual pre-draft workoutsplosion in Indianapolis.

Jones wasn’t Tennessee’s coach last season, of course. He was paid by the Vols, and he will be for the next couple of years, too, but his tenure ended so embarrassingly that Tennessee paid him millions of dollars to stop coaching the Vols. And he left successor Jeremy Pruitt with a rough situation.

For all those highly ranked recruiting classes Jones brought to Knoxville, none of them who finished their careers with the Vols were invited to this year's NFL Combine.

And for anyone who needed any more proof of why Pruitt wasn’t able to hit the ground running like Florida’s Dan Mullen, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, Mississippi State’s Joe Moorhead or even Ole Miss’ Matt Luke, there’s your proof. This shouldn’t have been a debate in the first place, but it darn sure should stop now.

Eight Texas A&M Aggies, Florida Gators and Mississippi State Bulldogs will be at the NFL Combine, but all three of those programs will be slightly outnumbered by the nine Ole Miss Rebels at the NFL Combine.

Last year’s five new SEC coaches sent a grand total of 33 players to the combine. None of those came from Tennessee. That is staggering.

That doesn’t mean Tennessee won’t have any players drafted, of course. Going to the combine doesn’t guarantee you a draft selection any more than missing it guarantees you won’t be drafted, and some of the Vols’ seniors are capable of showing out at the program’s annual Pro Timing Day, impressing in individual workouts and hearing their name called before the draft concludes. It’s possible. I wouldn’t put a mortgage payment on it, but it’s possible.

We don’t need to offer Pruitt any pity, though, and not just because he’s a proud Southern man who doesn’t want or need pity. I refuse to offer professional pity to anyone who’s paid in the neighborhood of $4 million annually to coach football and who is given even more money than that per year to assemble a staff. This is a hard job, but it’s a job that essentially guarantees financial security for your life and your children’s lives, so that juice is worth that squeeze.

But we do need to be fair to Pruitt. And we need to understand exactly what kind of situation he inherited. Yes, the Vols were just 5-7 last season, but they were 4-8 the season before that. They needed a coaching change for a reason. Few programs in history have won more games than Tennessee, and few programs in history have sent more players to the NFL than the Vols, but don’t be fooled by those recruiting rankings from the Jones’ years. A lot of those players were busts. Some were poor fits for Tennessee’s system. Some would have been poor fits in just about any system. Some got in their own way. All of them were coached by someone who, at least at that point in his career, was not mentally or emotionally equipped to consistently win at the highest levels in the nation’s toughest conference.

Only one program in the SEC failed to send at least one player to the NFL Combine, and that program was Tennessee. Every other program sent at least two, and every other program aside from Vanderbilt sent at least four.

Many of you were furious when the Vols ran out of gas late last season and got boat-raced by Missouri and Vanderbilt, but those Tigers are sending six players to the NFL Combine, and those Commodores are sending the aforementioned pair. Those teams had more talent than Tennessee. They were better football teams with better football players. Full stop.

You can’t understand the magnitude of Pruitt’s task unless you understand the situation he inherited. You just can’t.

If you want to feel hope for the future, though, you can do that.

Tennessee beat two ranked teams last season, and those two teams (Kentucky with eight, and Auburn with six) had a combined 14 players invited to the NFL Combine. Before the depth-depleted Vols ran out of gas, they were competitive against teams they should have been able to compete with and a couple of teams that were clearly superior on paper.

And the Vols just put the finishing touches on a solid recruiting class in Pruitt’s first full year wearing orange on the trail.

“But, Wes, didn’t you just mention Jones falling on his face despite signing good recruiting classes, including some that were better on paper than the one Pruitt just signed?”

Yes, I did.

But Pruitt isn’t Jones. I don’t know if Pruitt will win big at Tennessee, but his pedigree and his reputation in the business suggests he has a chance to at least restore respectability to one of college football’s proudest and most tradition-rich programs. That’s the basement of his potential. The worst-case scenario here is a much better situation than the one he inherited, and the ceiling is much higher than that. And I expect him to be closer to the ceiling than the basement. I look at the staff he’s been able to assemble thanks to his reputation as an evaluator and developer of talent and the backing of his boss, former Vols Hall of Fame football coach and current Vols athletic director Phillip Fulmer. Look at the list of assistants who have agreed to come work for Pruitt and then turned down good opportunities to leave in order to stay with Pruitt. That tells you what you need to know about the confidence his peers have in him despite Tennessee being his first head-coaching job at any level of football.

Pruitt spent years working under some of the best coaches in the business, and he played a huge role in Nick Saban’s Alabama project from Day One. He served as the Crimson Tide’s director of player development until working his way onto the coaching staff, and he became one of the best assistants to work for the Nicktator — and that’s a common belief, according to several people in and around the Alabama program.

Tennessee might not have a single player drafted in Pruitt’s first season, but that would hardly put Pruitt in the world’s worst company. No Alabama players were drafted in Saban’s first season, either.

Tennessee five-star offensive line signee Wanya Morris

Pruitt’s first Tennessee signing class (with a full year on the trail) finished percentage points outside the nation’s top 10, but it’s not just that number that impresses me — though it does impress me; no program with a losing record recruited as well as the Vols. The way Pruitt saw the Vols’ clearest deficiencies and addressed them impressed me the most.

This Tennessee roster is too small to win at the SEC level, especially playing the way Pruitt wants his teams to play. The Vols had to get bigger and stronger, and for all the work you can do in the weight room to fix that, some of it’s a simple matter of genetics. Tennessee needed bigger, stronger young men, and Pruitt and his staff went out and signed some bigger, stronger young men. That he beat some of the nation’s best programs to get many of those prospects made it all the more impressive, but the fact that he saw what his team needed was important. He addressed some major needs with two talented transfers, too, but we’ll see if the NCAA clears them to play in 2019. That’s hardly a sure thing.

Many of Tennessee’s signees will have to play as true freshmen, but some of them look physically equipped to do that. They’ll get tossed around a bit and learn some important lessons, but they’re big and strong enough to take some licks while dishing out some of their own.

I said from Day One that Pruitt’s Tennessee rebuild was at least a three-year project, and I still believe that. But I think the Vols can put a better product on the field next season, which as we all know is incredibly important for a proud fan base living in an instant-gratification society.

Things often have to get worse before they get better, but I think Tennessee has more or less gone through the roughest parts of the Pruitt era. This season will be challenging, for certain, but it can’t possibly be more challenging than last season. And some of Pruitt’s good work is the reason for that.