Tough news to share on Monday as the upcoming Missouri and Vanderbilt game reportedly won’t happen due to the league’s COVID guidelines for safe play.

Before the season started, the Southeastern Conference announced that its league teams would be required to have 53 scholarship players ready to play in order to compete on game day. In addition to having 53 players available, the SEC mandated that each team one quarterback, seven offensive linemen and four defensive linemen ready to play on game day.

Vanderbilt was dangerously close to that limit last weekend, and now it seems they have unfortunately passed that threshold.

According to a report by PowerMizzou.com, Vanderbilt will not travel to Missouri as previously scheduled on Saturday, resulting in a postponement of the matchup. PowerMizzou.com cites multiple sources on this report. Multiple reports have since confirmed this news but PowerMizzou was the first one to report the postponement.

Vanderbilt is set to be on a bye week on Saturday, Oct. 24, while Missouri’s bye week isn’t until Nov. 7.

Following the game with South Carolina, Derek Mason was specifically asked how many players the Commodores had out due to COVID.

“We’ve never spoke to medical issues that way in terms of our student-athletes, and for us, you know about the HIPAA laws just like I do,” Mason responded in his postgame press conference. “Discussing where our student-athletes are in terms of health issues or anything else like that is not something that we do here at Vanderbilt.”

Mason was then asked if he expected those numbers to improve in time for the Missouri game.

“I don’t know that. I went into this week having a solid idea and hoped really that we can get there,” Mason said. “But it’s like anything else. You go through the week and you’ve gotta get to Sunday to figure out exactly where the injuries are, and then testing provides another couple of hurdles that you’ve gotta get through throughout the week.

“So for me, these are challenging times, and I think in challenging times what you’ve gotta do is take it one day at a time. Our staff, our coaches and our student-athletes, we’re gonna always talk about health, safety and welfare of the student-athlete. But we gotta make sure too that we can be functional enough to play the style of football that we want to play and make sure we can keep our guys safe.”

We’ll keep you posted on this developing news.