Tennessee junior wide receiver Malik Elion

No, that wasn’t Darrin Kirkland Jr. catching a pass for Tennessee during the second quarter of Saturday’s loss to No 20 LSU at Neyland Stadium.

That was a different No. 34.

It was Malik Elion — a 5-foot-7 junior walk-on who sprints for the Vols track and field team, practices with the Vols football team as a walk-on and was not on the list of 104 football players on the media flip card for Saturday’s game.

Elion — a graduate of Memphis-area Houston High School — caught a pass from Jarrett Guarantano and raced across midfield, picking up 10 yards and a first down before being tackled at the LSU 46-yard line.

Despite not being on the media flip card, Elion has been listed on the football roster on Tennessee’s official website for most of the season, according to program officials.

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Senior tight end Ethan Wolf said he thought Elion had practiced with the team all season.

“Yeah, I think so,” Wolf said somewhat confidently, before looking over to junior defensive end Kyle Phillips for confirmation.

Phillips smiled.

“Yeah, he has been,” Phillips said.

Wolf said Elion first caught everyone’s eye as a scout-team kickoff return specialist, and that coaches eventually started discussing a way to get him on the field during a game.

A program source confirmed to GoVols247 that Tennessee has practiced that same Elion play for weeks, and that makes sense when considering the staff’s guts to call that play during a second quarter of a one-score game against the 20th-ranked team in the country.

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Wolf said the Vols were ready for the call when it came from the sideline.

“He’s fast, and, yes, that’s pretty much what we got from him there,” Wolf said. “He’s a track guy. He’s just an extremely fast kid, and it’s great that he earned that rep 100 percent through practice. He’s was our scout, … what was it, kickoff returner, I think. And he was just running through our kickoff team back and forth and back and forth, and the coaches just said, ‘We’ve got to get this kid the ball sometime.’

“That’s a play that we knew that we had in the playbook.”

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Contact Wes Rucker by email at wes.rucker@cbsinteractive.com or ON TWITTER, or FOLLOW GOVOLS247 ON FACEBOOK.