Phillip Fulmer initially said there are “many” ways to work your way up the ladder and succeed in any field, but he quickly corrected himself.

“There’s a few ways to do that,” Tennessee’s athletic director said.

One of the time-tested ways, though, is simple: grind.

That’s how Fulmer worked his way up the ladder from lining the fields and painting the weight room at Wichita State being a Hall of Fame head football coach at Tennessee, and Fulmer said Jeremy Pruitt has done the same thing to rise through the ranks from high school defensive coordinator to Vols head coach in a dozen years.

Fulmer said he saw a lot of himself in Pruitt when the two first sat down to really talk about the Tennessee vacancy, and that’s why Pruitt was the first person to get an offer from the Vols’ new athletic director.

He saw a grinder. He saw confidence that came genuinely through preparation. He saw someone who wouldn’t be afraid to make tough decisions and live with the consequences. He saw himself.

“I’ve been there,” Fulmer said. “I have done a lot of things — recruiting coordinator, so I know what that’s supposed to look like. I lined the fields at Wichita State. I painted the weight room. You work yourself up [the ladder]. And, you know, there’s an attitude that you have about how you go about being successful. There’s a few ways to do that, right, but I know being a grinder is one way, and that’s what (Pruitt) is, and that’s what I was.

"Our culture was that way.”

As much as Fulmer liked Pruitt from the beginning, though, he still wondered whether the Alabama (and former Georgia and Florida State) defensive coordinator was writing checks his confidence couldn’t cash when they spoke about the kind of staff the would-be, first-time head coach could bring with him to Knoxville.

To Fulmer’s pleasant surprise, Pruitt virtually batted 1.000 in that department.

Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt

“Really, the interview process for anybody — and I’m sure you’ve been through it probably on both sides, like I have — you never know for sure unless you’ve been around a person for a long period of time,” Fulmer said. “You just really don’t know for sure, because people can tell you one thing and do another, and another. And that’s often the case, you know? They’ll say, ‘We’re gonna bring these six people with us as assistant coaches,’ and then you’re thinking in the back of your mind, ‘Well, if we get three of those, that would be really good.’

“But he’s done exactly what he said he was gonna do in the interview. He’s exactly like I thought from being a detailed person, an organized person. He brought seven guys in here the second day on the job. That was incredible. He’s got a really good staff around him. They are football coaches.

“Four months into it, I’m more sure now that we got the right guy than I was in the interview, and I was really happy then. We’re heading in a good direction.”

As much as Fulmer wants Pruitt to hit the ground running the way Fulmer did when he replaced Johnny Majors at Tennessee, though, he knows that’s probably not realistic.

The Tennessee that Fulmer inherited from Majors and the Tennessee that Pruitt inherited from Butch Jones share virtually nothing aside from the orange uniforms. Fulmer took over a talented team that had recently won SEC championships. Pruitt took over arguably the worst team in program history — a team that lost eight games for the first time in program history, a team that went winless in SEC play for the first time in program history, and a team that lost to Vanderbilt and Kentucky in the same season.

Fulmer’s summary of the situation translated better in person than in print, but the point remains the same.

The goals are the same. The timelines are not.

“When I took over, it was like we were [chest-high], and then we went to here [head-high],” Fulmer said. “He’s like here [knee-high] and trying to get to here [head-high], so it’s a whole different dynamic. It’s gonna take time and a couple recruiting classes, and then we all want to be back in the championship mix. That’s our goal.”

Fulmer said he’s seen nothing to question his gut instinct to hire Pruitt, though, and that he’s even more convinced after watching the coach work for four months that Tennessee got the right guy for the job.

Tennessee’s former coach was a ubiquitous presence on the practice field this spring. He was careful to remain quiet and more or less watch from the shadows unless someone approached him first, but he nonetheless was there. And he really liked what he saw.

“I know that we always expected the very best from our best players,” Fulmer said. “We didn’t coddle our best players. We expected them to go to practice and show those young guys why they were successful. We coached ‘em hard, the older guys, and therefore the young ones were watching the older ones and concluding, ‘I want to be successful, too,’ so they worked hard, too.

“That comes with competition, you know, and we need more competition on this team, for sure.”