The Florida Gators will officially kick off fall camp in preparation for the 2021 season on August 6.
Fall camp around the country will look different this year. Reacting to a five-year concussion and head trauma study the NCAA has instituted new rules and guidelines for fall camp. Teams will be mandated to have seven padless practices and the number of contact practices has been decreased from 21 to 18 during the preseason. The NCAA also banned straight-line contact drills such as the Oklahoma Drill, and it limited the amount of contact in a practice to 75 minutes per practice. It also makes it illegal to have more than two straight days of full-contact practices.
Dan Mullen understands the changes but would have liked it if the NCAA would have allowed camp to start earlier. If the goal is to be as safe as possible and limit the number of consecutive days of full-contact hitting, why not start camp earlier, giving the coaches more time to put rest days in?
"I wish, one for medical reasons they would let us start earlier in spring camp, out with more off days, especially for safety purposes," Mullen said at SEC Media Days. "The biggest issue is repetitive hitting and yet they refuse to start earlier to give us more days off so we, by rule by you have to have more repetitive hitting which is a shame. I mean we try, we work as hard as we can to protect our players."
The Gators finished the 2020 season with three straight losses and are have a lot of turnover heading into this season, namely a new starting quarterback in Emory Jones. Florida's 2021 season will feature an entirely different offense than the SEC but Mullen is looking forward to the challenge of recreating the explosiveness and production of 2020 in a new way this season.
"To me the best part of this job is coaching football and coaching and developing. That's my favorite thing in the world to do," Mullen said. "How do you put together a plan? How do you take young people, develop them and identify their talents and then put them in a position to go be successful? That's what I love doing. So that's a lot of fun."
