Gators resume team activities after two weeks without practice
No. 10 Florida reopened its football facilities Monday and resumed team activities after a 14-day suspension, which began Oct. 13.
The Gators will hold practice this afternoon for the first time in two weeks. A COVID-19 outbreak on the team, which resulted in 25 cases in the span of a week, forced the program to postpone the LSU and Missouri games.
“Good to be back in the office today,” UF coach Dan Mullen said. “I think everybody’s really excited, ready to get back after it, ready to get back to football. After not playing, I think that’s something that is big within the team right now, is that ability to get back out on the field.
“I don’t expect us to come out there and have certainly our sharpest, most crisp practice of the year. But I do expect us to have great energy, excitement and enthusiasm on the field to be back out there to get going as we kind of build up to Saturday.”
Florida will host Mizzou at 7:30 p.m. and LSU on Dec. 12. Mullen said the team’s last positive test was this past Saturday, and he expects to have enough players available for this weekend.
The challenge now is getting them into their game routine.
“The league says if you have 53 you've got to play. I'm sure we’ll have 53 guys ready to play,” Mullen said. “It’s been two weeks since we've practiced, it'll be three weeks between games. That's not kind of a normal deal. For us, just getting our guys back into a regular game week routine, we’ll try to do that today.
“We had a team meeting this morning, getting prepped, getting mind back in. Treating it as kind of coming off a bye week even though it’s like a double bye, you’re just still coming off the bye week to get back into the game routine, get back into the game schedule and get ready to go.”
Despite the long layoff, Mullen said last week he thought his players were “pretty much into game shape” after the first three games. He and his staff will spend time with them this week working on fundamentals, which would have happened during a traditional bye.
“I just want to see consistency in play. To me, that is a big part of it, watching our consistent effort, consistent performance on the field, our physicality,” Mullen said. “I saw some positives. I saw us doing some things better from one week to the next over the first three weeks of getting back to being kind of normal defensively, I think slowing down.
“We want to see guys react today at practice and to make sure we’re kind of taking care and doing all the little things the right way: the effort to the ball, the technique, fundamentals, make sure we’re fitting our gap and that as a coaching staff, we’ve put the guys in the right positions to make plays.”