It's hard for me to be impartial about Jimbo, because one my best friends is a huge FSU fan/booster, he played baseball there, and hates him with the heat of 10,000 suns. He hated Jimbo BEFORE the national title, so you can only imagine how he felt about the every off-season NFL flirtations and the slagging of the school and boosters and the fucking dreadful roster he left in his wake.
On the "Jimbo has a natty" argument -- does he feel the same way about Chizik? Would he rather have Chizik than say Fleck, Gundy. Patterson, Mullens, Riley, Herman, etc? If that's the case, then there's not much you can do to help him.
I think you could make a case for either guy honestly, but the thing that separates them for me is that I think we've seen everything that Jimbo is and we don't know what Pruitt is/could be. Jimbo is a solid football coach who did a really good job getting the house in order and winning a title with Bowden's guys. That roster was incredibly talented but underperforming and he did a really good job getting them back to playing football in all three phases. When Jimbo is left with his own players/evals he is lost in a timewarp. His archaic offense and his old school player evals are made for clock draining football with massive guys on the LOS. Neither translates to CFB (Or the NFL) today and he is unwilling to yield on either element. His WCO and his Cubes are the staples of who he is and will not change. You have to adapt or the game passes you by and his ego/id ensures that he will NEVER adapt - look at his goddamn offense - while coaching in Texas. With droves of 7-on-7 spread skill players and QBs that come in already knowing a HUGE amount of the modern offenses. (*not how quickly Leach's concepts are now in place at MooState).
That's the entire argument to me - when faced with easy answers to his numerous issues instead of adapting his own offense, Jimbo continues to square peg round holes and try to run that archaic offense that requires WAY too much time to teach for an end result that nets less yards, points, and wins. Even if it's optimal it's still worse. It's hard to argue FOR that coach. Esp as the landscape continues to evolve, every season the sport moves further away from the complex slow paced WCO - which means that every year Jimbo falls another step further behind.
Pruitt has evolved some of his defensive philosophies already so I think we can assume that at least for now, he's willing to adapt and change. Ditto with his player evals while he tends to play a little size queen at OL like Fisher (see Gooch), but he's targeted some of the longer, leaner, more athletic OL guys like Parker and Smith. Guys that really translate to modern college (and NFL) football and his DL guys are lean, very athletic - fast/quick. Spread killers not giant maulers.
The downside is that Pruitt lost to Georgia State at home. That can't EVER happen. EVER. To be fair, he also turned that same team around and went 7-1 to finish the season. It wasn't very pretty and it was against the lower-tier teams but they were all better than Georgia State and that loss could've defined his tenure and that team. Instead he rallied and the kids bought in and trusted him. I don't know if he'll turn Tennessee around all the way but the roster is way better now than when he got there. I think he's got to take some steps forward again this year and that will include winning 2-3 games that they "shouldn't" win on paper and winning all of the games that the Vols should win.