Jeremy Pruitt announces Tennessee has stopped practicing due to positive COVID tests
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A minor setback has been experienced on Rocky Top as Tennessee has stopped practice for the moment.
Jeremy Pruitt announced the news during his Friday media availability, noting that the program had very few cases of COVID outside of a July testing date after Tennessee gave its players time away from the facility.
While he would not announce how many positive tests Tennessee had in its building, Pruitt expressed this decision was more of a precaution to stop a spread than a massive outbreak within the program.
“This week, we had a few more positive tests, so I elected to shut practice down,” Pruitt said on Friday. “We retested everybody again this morning to see where we’re at. Our number one priority here is to be able to protect everybody associated with our program — and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.
“And as we get the results back, we’ll see exactly where we’re at, at we’ll start practice back accordingly.”
Tennessee was slated to practice on Friday that was missed and currently has a practice scheduled for Saturday that could be missed following this news.
During his Friday press conference, Pruitt was asked if Tennessee had a specific number that needs to be reached to shut down practice.
“We’ve not put a number on the testing, it’s just we’ve been very low to zero, for the most part of the entire summer – with the exception of one week,” Pruitt added. “So, wasn’t at zero or one this week, so we want to make sure that we figure out why.”
The key to Pruitt’s decision to shut things down was to stamp out any possibility of a spread within the program.
“We want to make sure that it’s not spreading within our building, because to this point, we’ve had zero spread and the tracing from within our building,” he added. “That’s just one of the things we wanted to make sure of.”
A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Michael Wayne Bratton oversees the news coverage for Saturday Down South. Michael previously worked for FOX Sports and NFL.com
