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Bruce Pearl on his time at Tennessee: ‘I ran a clean program’

150729 brucepearl

Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl spoke with AL.com in a video that was published on Monday, and during the interview he addressed the issues that got him into trouble at Tennessee.

Specifically, he made it clear that his one mistake shouldn’t change the fact that he and his staff ran a clean program while in Knoxville.
READ MORE: On Bruce Pearl -- ‘If you win, there’s always another job

“The decision that we made, I had about 100 people at my house on a Saturday after a Florida football game, and about 96 of them were allowed to be there,” Pearl said. “We had three committed kids that really couldn’t have been there, shouldn’t have been there. I let them come and just said, ‘Don’t say nothing to nobody about what a good cook I am.’”

“The great devastation for me is when I lied. No matter whether I came back a week or two later and tried to tell the truth, didn’t matter. I made that mistake. I had to own that. That’s probably the biggest thing, I let so many people down. Its not so much what we did. I ran a clean program. We did a lot of things really, really right, but we made a mistake and paid a huge price.”

The full video can be seen below: