Illinois football’s list of players ruled out for Saturday’s game against Purdue topped a dozen. It wasn’t a rash of injuries that swept through the Illini program this week. Those dozen-plus players were held out for the reason that’s now become typical in college football: COVID-19.
Starting quarterback Brandon Peters and backup tight end Griffin Moore both tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday, Illinois announced about an hour before Saturday’s game. Those positives cases saw double-digit players swept up in a round of contact tracing.
“We have a couple positives,” Illinois coach Lovie Smith said the Illini lost 31-24 in front of a nearly-empty Memorial Stadium. “That’s it. The rest of them are out because of contact tracing. That’s all I’m going to talk about.”
Peters and Moore, per Big Ten protocol, will be sidelined for 21 days. That means they’ll miss the Illini’s next two games — home against Minnesota on Nov. 7 and at Rutgers on Nov. 14 — before becoming eligible to return ahead of the Nov. 21 game at Nebraska. The players held out for contact tracing purposes, which included backup quarterback Isaiah Williams, will quarantine for 10 days per Centers for Disease Control guidelines and will miss next week’s 2:30 p.m. home game against the Gophers.
Smith said he didn’t know if Illinois’ positive cases were tied to the outbreak at Wisconsin this week. Wisconsin, who beat the Illini 45-7 at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 23, was up to 22 positive cases Saturday after having already canceled its game at Nebraska.
“It’s hard to tell where it came from,” Smith said. “We’ve been a lot of places. Did we go to Wisconsin? Yes. Did we spend the night in Wisconsin? Yes we did. We were on the bus.
“We’re not in a bubble, so we live in the world. Things can happen. I just want to say team-wise, we don’t have a big problem within our team with actual guys who have tested positive.”