Tennessee AD isolating for COVID

Tennessee athletic director and former Volunteers football coach Phillip Fulmer said Friday he is in isolation after testing positive for COVID-19.

Fulmer, 70, posted on Twitter that he is “feeling fine” and was deemed not to have been in close contact with any Tennessee athletes or “sport-specific staff members.”

Tennessee plays at No. 23 Auburn tonight.

Fulmer is a College Football Hall of Famer who coached the Vols for 17 years and won the 1998 national championship. He has been Tennessee’s AD since 2017.

This came as University of Miami football coach Manny Diaz became the latest active coach to announce he has contracted the virus. Diaz made a similar social media post earlier to announce he tested positive for COVID-19 and is isolating. Miami is not scheduled to play again until Dec. 5 at Wake Forest. The Hurricanes this week were forced to postpone games scheduled for today and Nov. 28 because of coronavirus issues.

Diaz was the second coach from a Power Five school to publicly acknowledge testing positive this week, along with Maryland’s Mike Locksley. Locksley’s team, like Diaz’s, had its game today called off because of COVID-19 issues within the program. As of Friday afternoon, 16 of the 62 games across major college football had been postponed or canceled. That’s the most disrupted games in any week of this season, one more than last week.

Among the other active coaches to have said they tested positive for COVID-19 are: Florida’s Dan Mullen, Florida State’s Mike Norvell, Purdue’s Jeff Brohm, Arizona’s Kevin Sumlin, Kansas’ Les Miles and Troy’s Chip Lindsey, who will not be with his team when the Trojans play Middle Tennessee State today.

Alabama coach Nick Saban also tested positive, but did not miss a game after that result was later deemed false.

■ Washington State athletic director Pat

Chun says the school has nine football players in COVID-19 protocols and four players had to be put into the protocol Friday morning, leading to the cancellation of the Cougars’ game at Stanford. Chun said as of last weekend, the Cougars had zero players in their COVID protocols and the first positive test came early in the week. The four positives Friday kept the Cougars from reaching the Pac-12 mandate of 53 scholarship players available.