Vols Practice Hindered by COVID-19 Absences, Injuries with 44 Players Out

Last Friday, Jeremy Pruitt announced Tennessee had elected to cancel practice in an attempt to mitigate a potential COVID-19 spread within their football facilities.

At that time, Pruitt said, "Today, we elected not to practice. As you guys know, we continue to constantly test within our program and we have really had very good results the entire time with the exception of, like I said before, when I gave them eight days off for the Fourth of July. But this week, we had a few more positive tests, so I elected to shut practice down. We retested everybody again this morning to see where we’re at. Our No. 1 priority here is to be able to protect everybody associated with our program and that’s what we’re going to continue to do. As we get the results back, we’ll see exactly where we’re at and we’ll start practice up accordingly.”

The Vols returned to practice the next day, and Tennessee has continued to practice since, however, Pruitt made a key update on the status of his team today.

"We had slated for a scrimmage, really had one slated for Wednesday and was going to back it up to today, but we didn’t scrimmage. Got way too many guys out,” Pruitt told reporters during a media session on Zoom. “We had 44 players that didn’t practice today, and they hadn’t practiced, probably for the last three or four practices. Just didn’t think that was wise to scrimmage. Just went with a normal practice. Only got 30 offensive players that were able to practice, so really focused on two groups," Pruitt said today during a Zoom call with reporters.

Pruitt later added, "All those guys are not COVID related—I don’t know the exact number COVID related, but I think it’s close to 27-28 when you talk about quarantining people also.”

The big issue for us has really been the contact tracing. That’s where we’ve had, I believe to this day, we’ve had 48 guys miss at least 14 days through the quarantine, and four of those guys have been quarantined twice," Pruitt added on the status of his team.

He also mentioned that it is possible that the Vols will only get in 20-22 of their allotted 25 practices before South Carolina. The Vols will play the Gamecock on the 26th of this month.