Will Grier receives praise from Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt

The college football season is officially under 100 days away for the West Virginia Mountaineers.

Yesterday things got kicked off at the Belk College Football Kickoff luncheon held in Charlotte, NC with head coaches Jeremy Pruitt and Dana Holgorsen. Coach Holgorsen is entering his 8th season as the Mountaineer head football coach, while Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt is in his first season as the head man.

At the luncheon, several different topics were brought up, including all of the hype surrounding quarterback Will Grier and the Mountaineers. Pruitt was asked if he had already started preparing for Will Grier and the Tennessee coach had high praise for the senior gunslinger.

“I did watch a bunch of tape during the month of May and he reminds me of a guy that played at Texas A&M, Johnny Manziel. I mean he can extend, he’s a great athlete, he’s obviously a great competitor, runs with toughness, can make all the throws, extends plays. They do a fantastic job, he knows where the ball is going pre-snap, gets all their RPO stuff, gets the ball out of his hand. He does a fantastic job, so yeah, he’s a great player.”

Coach Holgorsen was also asked what to expect with Tennessee and their first year head coach, “Got no idea, but we changed up all of our stuff too. So they’re not going to have any idea what we’re going to do.” Holgorsen continued in a subtly joking manner, “We worked on ourselves too all spring and we worked on the wishbone, option, we’re getting rid of the three down front and kick it to more four down front stuff. Played a lot of zone coverage last year, we’re going to do mostly man coverage this year.”

Holgorsen also went on to say:

“Two things. There’s not a whole lot of secrets in college football, everybody knows each other. We’re going to do our due diligence and we watched the orange and white game too and we’ll watch all the Alabama stuff obviously from coaches past. That’s just what coaches do and there’s a lot of time between here and the first game to try and figure it out.”

The 8th edition of the Belk College Football Kickoff between West Virginia and Tennessee is set to kickoff on September 1st with the kickoff time still to be announced, but is believed to be a 3:30 p.m. start.