Covid will prevent Vols from playing in the Liberty Bowl

The Tennessee football team will not play in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl due to COVID issues.

Several in the program tested positive for the virus after the Vols 34-13 loss to Texas A&M. Tennessee test their entire program including every Sunday afternoon.

When Tennessee accepted the bid to the match up with West Virginia in Memphis, they did not have the test results back.

Results came back Monday morning with multiple positive tests. Tennessee retested all of them to make sure there is not a batch of false positives. They also conducted a second round of test on Monday for everyone in the program.

After the results of the retest, Tennessee has paused all football operations.

Tennessee was without assistant coaches Jay Graham and Derrick Ansley on Saturday for COVID related issues and the latest round of testing including positive tests and contact tracing puts Tennessee in a situation where they don’t have the numbers player wise or coaching to play in the post season game.