Watch: Tennessee Returns to the Practice Field on Labor Day

Tennessee returned to the practice field today for the 11th practice of the pre-season. The Vols are limited in numbers, as Jeremy Pruitt announced on Saturday that Tennessee had 44 players out. You can watch the Vols highlights above.

A couple of notes from the video: Warren Burrell was sporting heavy tape to his right hand and wrist, but he was continuing to practice. Burrell has been wearing a brace around campus for at least a few days, so this is not something new.

At least three quarterbacks were at practice today, as JT Shrout, Jarrett Guarantano, and Harrison Bailey were all featured in the video. The number two spot heading into week 1 will likely come down to Shrout and Bailey at this point. As Maurer has been hampered with injuries, intel suggests that Bailey has made significant strides over the last week.

On Saturday, Pruitt said:

We had a scrimmage slated for today, really had one slated for Wednesday, and were going to back it up today, but we didn’t scrimmage. Got way too many guys out. We’ve got 44 players that didn’t practice today, and they hadn’t practiced for the last three or four practices. So just didn’t think that was wise to scrimmage and went with a normal practice – only got 30 offensive players that were able to practice. We really focused on two groups and still had a lot of situational football and had a chance to work short yardage, red area, some third down, so got some good work in on special teams.

“It’s just something that we’re going through. Obviously, as we ramp up the testing we’ve had a few more positives, which that's going to happen. Really the big issue for us is the contact tracing and that’s where we’ve had tons of players, to be exact to this date, we’ve had 48 guys who’ve missed at least 14 days who were quarantined. Four of those guys have been quarantined twice. So we’re talking about 52 guys in that. Some of the guys who were in quarantine self-reported. They were around somebody with COVID and in the testing it ended up showing up that they have it. The other 50 guys, we’ve had 1 out of 50 that has eventually tested positive for COVID. So we’re trying to get through the contact tracing. You know when a guy misses 14 days of practice or 14 days of training, starting over is kind of having a cumulative effect a little bit. A few injuries here and there, nothing severe, but some guys have had to miss some practice time. It’s definitely been challenging and we’ve got to continue to improve as a football team and figure out the circumstances and figure out a way to be productive in them.”

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