Meet the person Mark Stoops calls ‘invaluable’ to Kentucky football

In the chaotic, ever-changing world that is college football, every coach needs a behind-the-scenes person who can take care of the details, solve problems and make the trains run on time. Every coach needs a right-hand man.

Josh Pruitt is Mark Stoops’ right-hand man.

“Josh and Eddie Gran,” the Kentucky head coach said recently. “Those two are my right-hand men.”

A former UK offensive coordinator, Gran is now special assistant to the head coach. Meanwhile, Pruitt is in his fifth year as the team’s director of football operations, a job that has become more and more important as programs expand, a job where the DFO must know anything and everything.

“From an operational standpoint, he is invaluable,” Stoops said. “He does a remarkable job at what he has to do and more. He’s very, very detailed, very efficient. Knock on wood, but every away, every home game and every road game work like clockwork. I think a rhythm and a routine are very important and Josh knows that and what I’m looking for.”

“I love being able to be the guy that can say, I have the plan,” Pruitt said. “I don’t say I have all the answers, but we’re going to try and find one, and the best solution to a lot of problems, myself and Eddie Gran and (director of recruiting/general manager) Chase Heuke. I think we’re all really good at foreseeing problems and trying to have a plan ahead of everything.”

‘A football guy in administration’

A native of Ellsworth, Kansas, Pruitt played tight end at Garden City Community College in Kansas, then for a pair of former UK offensive coordinators in Neal Brown and Tony Franklin at Troy University in Alabama. Now the head coach at West Virginia, Brown and former UK player and coach John Schlarman, who also coached at Troy, spoke at Pruitt’s wedding in 2017.

“You’ve got a football guy in administration,” Gran said. “You’ve got a guy who has been on both sides and I think it’s huge because he understands both points of view.”

Pruitt earned a criminal justice degree at Troy and planned on going into law enforcement before Brown offered him a graduate assistant position. From there, Pruitt coached at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and then East Mississippi Community College. By that time, Brown had moved from Troy to Texas Tech under Tommy Tuberville.

Pruitt was coaching at Kilgore Junior College in Texas when Brown got the offensive coordinator job under Mark Stoops at UK in 2013. Brown brought Pruitt with him to Lexington. After serving two years as a grad assistant, Pruitt moved into the administrative side as director of player development.

“I went to Coach (Stoops) and said, ‘I’d like to be here. I could do this job. I can run the camps,” he said. “And, you know, let me do some analytics for the defense. I’m a numbers guy. I try and envision, you know, what could happen and, you know, he took a chance on me and hired me full time at that time.”

Moving to director of football operations

In 2020, the director of football operations job came open when Frank Buffano moved on the field to coach the safeties.

“I remember the day Coach called me to the middle of the field in the indoor facility and said, “OK, this operation job is going to open up. Before I ask anybody else, do you want it?’” Pruitt said. “It was an immediate yes. It gave me the opportunity to be here in Lexington. And being a younger coach, I didn’t want trying to jump and jump from job to job. That I was why I wanted to go to the administration side.”

So what does Pruitt do? He’s the person you are most likely to see right by Stoops’ side before games and after. Pruitt creates the calendar for the program for the entire year. He coordinates players’ class times and tutor times, practice times, weight-lifting times, etc. He has a recruiting calendar. He handles much of the pregame and postgame plan and execution.

“I’m kind of the point guy for a lot of different people,” Pruitt said. “The hardest part of my job is making sure everything stays on schedule.”

His first road trip as DFO happened to be the 2020 season opener at Auburn during COVID. Somehow, the pregame timeline slipped through the cracks. Stoops was not happy. Neither was Pruitt. He vowed that would never happen again. And it hasn’t.

Obviously, a DFO has to be detailed and organized. Pruitt said his grandparents’ organizational skills rubbed off on him when he was younger. He’s not a hoarder. If he’s not using something, he tends to pitch it. He’s also always trying to think ahead, to anticipate potential problems and come up with solutions.

“What I love also about Josh, even early when he stepped into that role, is that once he understood what I was looking for, he could take that and run with it,” Stoops said. “He takes ownership of it.”

“I don’t like going to Coach and saying, ‘What do you think we have to do here?’” Pruitt said. “My approach to him is, ‘Hey, Coach, this is what could happen, and here’s our options.’ I try and take as much stuff off of his plate as I can and make his life as easy as possible.”

One of Pruitt’s biggest responsibilities involves road games. He was already involved with advanced travel before taking over for Buffano, but now he’s the man responsible when the Cats hit the road. The SEC’s DFOs communicate with each other through group chats and Google Docs about hotel personnel and catering contacts at league destinations. Preferably, teams don’t like to stay at a hotel longer than a 50-minute drive to the stadium.

“You’re very limited in the SEC really because, think about this, Nashville and Lexington are the two largest cities,” he said. “I mean, hotels and conference centers, are not hard to come by here. But you go on the road, you’re playing in Starkville, Mississippi, right? There’s not conference centers around there, so you’re very limited on where you can go.”

Solving a logistics problem at Mississippi State

Take Kentucky’s 2023 game at Mississippi State. The Cats would normally stay in Columbus (30 minutes away) or Tupelo (45 minutes away). That was before a Courtyard Hotel with a convention center was built in Starkville. UK stayed there in 2021. But then the university bought the Courtyard. Visiting teams were no longer allowed to stay there. And on the Saturday of UK’s game against the Bulldogs last year, Ole Miss was also playing at home. Its opponent had already booked the hotel and convention center in Tupelo.

That left Columbus. One problem. There was no convention center available in Columbus and teams need the facility for meals, meetings, walk-throughs, etc. Having coached in Mississippi, Pruitt knew that Philadelphia, Miss., had a casino with hotels and a convention center. Pruitt checked it out, thought it would work, but the option wasn’t his favorite.

“And so I was driving through Columbus again and there was a brand new Hyatt that had opened up that had 100, 80 rooms maybe. And I need about 145 rooms on the road,” Pruitt said. “Well, next to it was a Best Western, and across the street was a Quality Inn. And so I took 25 rooms over there, and 15 rooms over here.”

But what about a convention space? Pruitt called around to find the best wedding venue in the Columbus area and the best food vendor in the Golden Triangle.

“I found this company, and they apparently had all these great reviews, do all this amazing stuff. I said, ‘I need you guys to meet me at the parking lot of the Hyatt.’ And I said, ‘Also, when you guys go do weddings, who builds your tents and stuff like that?

“And they gave me the contact. I called them and said, ‘I’m standing in the parking lot of the Hyatt and I need you all to build me a conference center. Can you guys build me a giant banquet center? I need, you know, tables for 125 to sit and eat.’ I said, ‘I need meeting rooms. I need heat and air. I need lights, flooring. I need everything. What can you guys do?’ They said, ‘Coach, we can build it.’”

Pruitt presented Stoops two options. Stoops preferred the Columbus option, if Pruitt was confident he could get it done. Pruitt said he could. “I trust you,” Stoops said.

And it worked. “It really could not have been better,” said Pruitt. “And we won down there for the first time in a long time.”

Josh Pruitt’s future plans

Is this what Pruitt wants to continue doing? The 41-year-old said one day he would like to be an athletic director. He wants to stay on the administrative side for his family life with wife Allison and children Cannon, 4, and Oakleigh, 2. Mainly, Pruitt just wants to be part of it, to help Stoops and the program in any way he can.

“It’s a fulfilling job. It really is,” he said. “Coach Stoops is unbelievable to work for. And you know, the people that I interact with, the vendors, the caterers, the food, everybody is so great to work with around here. Great people.”

“There’ll be times when Josh will say to me, ‘You know your uncle is coming in this weekend,’” said Stoops. “And I’ll be like, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’” He knows more about that than I do.”

“Knowing the needs of everybody in every department, that’s what has been impressive to me,” Gran said. “Josh is a jack-of-all trades. He really is.”

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