He wasn't involved in most of the parts of practice. He was in the crowd socializing with fans who came to practice or on the field talking to media. When he was involved, he was socializing with the starters, not scrubs like me.
He never got on me, but he did defend me one time. When I was on scout team defense, I picked off a Leftwich pass. The next play, the card told me to blitz in the A gap, which I did. There was miscommunication between the center and guard about who was supposed to pick me up, so I went through almost untouched. As I went through the gap and started to let up so that I wouldn't get close to Byron, the guard shoved me in the back at the last second which pushed me into Byron as he was throwing. Kueck and the center started yelling at me. As I was yelling back, Pruett jumped in and said "if you sons-of-bitches would do what you were supposed to and block who you are supposed to, you wouldn't have to push him in the back and have that happen!" Kueck only saw the end of the play of me hitting Byron without seeing what the cause was.
Gale was the one who yelled at me twice. The first time was the very first day of fall practice. Remember, due to baseball, I didn't get to have spring football practice with drills. The first day, I was matched up in a drill with the first-team inside linebacker in a 1-on-1 tackling drill. I did the drill and supposedly hit him too hard. Gale ripped into me and kicked me out of the drill saying that I was going too hard and hitting him too low. After the drill, the linebacker came over to me on the sideline and told me to keep doing exactly what I did, as they needed that type of speed in drills to get better. Going half-ass was what would result in injury for somebody.
I shared this story 10+ years ago on here . . . there was a walk-on offensive lineman from a very small WV town that didn't have high school football. It was his first year at Marshall as a 22 year old freshman. He was huge: 6'7. 320 lbs., either engaged or married to his high school girlfriend but had never really lifted. He was a really nice, quiet guy. He wasn't totally weak, but he wasn't as strong as a lineman should be in the weight room. However, he had very quick feet and was very athletic for a lineman.
Since I was a workout warrior, he grew a liking to me and always wanted to partner with me during team lifts. One practice, Pruett came over to us: not to socialize, but to make a point. He made a comment about his awareness of my strength, but then moved onto the walk-on offensive lineman. He said "Coach Jenkins (strength coach) told me about the improvement you've had with him. He said you get incredibly stronger almost every week." I thought he was going to congratulate the kid for working hard, but Pruett knew what was going on. He went on saying "in fact, the improvements are so drastic, that Coach Jenkins said it can't be naturally done. I'm not saying not to keep doing it, but I'm just telling you to not get caught."
Pruett was aware he was juicing and didn't care.
