As Crouch watches Tennessee this year, he said he will be “just seeing if they can compete and seeing if they could be up to something.”
“I played at a program that wasn’t that good,” he said. “I’m here. And I built it and we won a state championship, so I’m used to taking a hard road and building up to go get it. So I’m not shy about going somewhere and having to really go get it, having to grind it out and get it.”
He said he stays in frequent contact with Pruitt and Vols tight ends coach
Brian Niedermeyer.
“I talk to both of them, but I probably talk with Niedermeyer a little bit more, and I always talk to Pruitt,” Crouch said. “I have a good relationship with both of them. I like Pruitt a lot. I feel like he’s a real honest guy. He shoots you straight, and I feel like he’s loyal. And that’s the most important thing to me, is loyalty.
“Pruitt’s a loyal dude. You can see it. He’s not just talking about it. He did it with the people he’s got on his staff — I mean, with all the people that came from Alabama and everything like that. He’s just helping out who helped him.
“If football doesn’t work out, you know that he’ll be there for you, so that’s really important.”
Crouch said Niedermeyer is “a real cool dude, down-to-earth.”
“You can talk to him more than about football,” Crouch said of Niedermeyer. “You can talk to him about anything. He said he played basketball (Friday). I talked to him (Friday), because they’re in Charlotte. And he was like, ‘Yeah, man, I can hoop. Man, I’m a baller.’ So whenever we get to see what his shot looks like, that’s what I’m doing.”
While most teams, including Tennessee, are recruiting Crouch as a two-way athlete who could play running back or linebacker in college — in part because he has expressed interest in playing linebacker — he admitted that he thinks the Vols might “want me more as a running back.”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “I’m going to always be honest about everything I say. If you ask me about Tennessee, I feel like they would want me more as a running back. Now, that’s just my feel to it.”
Crouch insisted he “can’t pick nobody just standing out right now” among his current group of favorites.
He said he plans to trim his list of seven favorites to a smaller group of finalists at some point, but he’s still “not sure” when he might be ready to announce his college choice.
“I’m a midyear (enrollee),” he said, “so it’s going to come a little faster, whatever it is.”