Jim Chaney had a cush gig at Georgia, but when the veteran offensive coordinator got a call from Jeremy Pruitt last December, it was time to talk to the Mrs.

“My wife and I have always enjoyed Knoxville,” Chaney said. “It’s a place that we could always see ourselves living for a long time. So when Coach Pruitt called, you never know, but it’s one of the few, maybe the only job, that I ever would’ve considered leaving the spot I was at for.”

A raise to $1.5 million certainly helped make that decision a bit easier, but Chaney, now the highest-paid offensive coordinator in the country, is clearly enjoying his encore on Rocky Top.

The 57-year-old coach is back at a place with his family (his daughter is a senior at Tennessee), old friends both on campus and at previous stomping grounds like Roosters and a school he hold fond memories of during a four-year stint (2009-12) that included a win as the team’s interim coach.

“I’ve got my statue,” Chaney joked Friday.

“It’s a bobblehead doll.”

Chaney is relishing in his current “honeymoon period.” He spent the winter watching tape of Tennessee’s 2018 team and jotting down notes on his new players. Chaney’s new CEO walk-around role has allowed installing his offense to happen much more seamlessly this spring.

“It’s great,” he said, “I can’t mess anything up.”

Still, Chaney knows it’s easy to be cheeky right now, but come the fall, it’s his responsibility to pull a Melisandre and breathe life into an offense that’s been dormant for two years. The Vols have ranked in the 120s nationally the last two seasons, and the veteran playcaller is already primed for plenty of armchair quarterbacking in the fall.

“There’s going to be a third-and-1, and I’m going to make a call and each one of y’all are gonna say, ‘What in the hell was that?’ As will my wife,” he said, chuckling.

“We all know that. So this has been fun, to get reacquainted with friends and do things like that. I’m really enjoying it, to be honest with you. I’ve had a lot of fun. Pruitt has been good to work with. The staff he’s put together, on my side of the ball, I couldn’t ask for anything better.”

Throughout his career, Chaney has shown the ability to be amorphous, adapting his scheme to suit his pool of players. He’s thrown it, he’s run it, and he’s thrown it and run it.

Chaney hasn’t thought a whole lot about how he’s changed from his first rodeo at Tennessee, but upon further reflection Friday, he decided his stops at Arkansas and Georgia truly taught him the importance of physicality in relation to success in the SEC.

That’s music to Pruitt’s ears, and exactly why he targeted a guy who had so much experience in the conference.

“It’s difficult to win it without that quality,” Chaney said.

“It’s easy to say it. It’s always lip service. But how do you go out and get it done? That’s a difficult task. Trying to teach kids the importance of that, I think I’m better at doing that now than I was before.”

For the rest of spring, Chaney hopes to figure out how “get that done” with a group that struggled with physicality most of 2018. He’s seen incremental improvement after each of the first eight practices, and once the spring is over, he’ll sit down with every unit and identity what they need to do to be successful in the fall.

“You see their fleas and then you go to work on their fleas,” Chaney said.

“We will be able to define that for our kids and let them go to work on it and they will. Our kids have proven they will work.”