With his team off last Saturday, Florida coach Dan Mullen tuned in to the Missouri-Kentucky game to scout the Tigers.
He called their 20-10 win over UK a “dominating” performance and voted them in the top 25 on his ballot the following day.
"They're an excellent football team and you see that,” Mullen said on the SEC teleconference Wednesday. “They've got talent from last year with some guys coming back. In their defensive scheme, they play hard and play physical. Defensively, they have a good scheme that creates issues and problems for you all over the field.
“And then offensively, they’ve shown they can do it both ways. They can play the grind it out, physical, ball control game, or they can light it up. So obviously a great challenge. I think they’re an excellent football team. I voted them in the top 25 this past week.”
The No. 10 Gators practiced Monday for the first time in two weeks after pausing team activities due to their COVID outbreak. Mullen was anticipating a sloppy return to the field, but said the players are starting to find their groove again.
“I thought we’ve looked better,” Mullen said. “We gotta treat it like coming back from a bye within our schedule, but when you haven’t even done anything in two weeks, it's a little bit of a slower start than what a regular bye would be. But that’s what we expected. But I was pleased to see we were better yesterday than we were the day before and hopefully we’re a little sharper even today.
“We talked about that as a team, is the buildup. I told everybody, I didn't expect Monday to be this unbelievably sharp practice. I just wanted us to have a great attitude and excitement to be back out there on the field. What we gotta do is build up to get ready to play on Saturday. Our attitude has been really good and we talked about how it would be. But it’s going to be a buildup all the way to Saturday for us.”
The buildup is even more involved for players who have recovered from COVID-19. UF athletics director Scott Stricklin said all of them would undergo a full cardiac workup prior to resuming team activities.
The SEC also mandates a four-day reacclimation period for players who test positive: 25 percent of a normal practice routine on Day 1, 50 percent on Day 2, 75 percent on Day 3 and full participation on Day 4. That means Mullen won’t be able to hold a full practice until Thursday.
"After our guys have tested positive, we go do a massive screening. They’re doing not just EKG’s, they’re doing echos (echocardiogram), they do blood work tests to make sure there’s complete safety that way for them for their health of preparing to return,” Mullen said. “Then there's the physical buildup because guys have been in isolation and haven’t done anything. So you’re doing a physical fitness buildup, moving up from one day to the next. There’s a several day buildup that way.
“And then honestly, we even do more than that because our guys haven't done anything in 14 days. So we’ve done a buildup kind of this week. We shut the program down and kind of put everybody in the program in quarantine. But our guys that didn’t test positive, there’s a buildup for them to get back into playing shape after no team-related activities for two weeks. So there’s quite a deal. It is a pretty intense buildup back.”
