Spring ends early, what does that mean for the rest of the offseason?
Florida kicked off spring football camp a month early in 2021. It was a way to move on from a disappointing end to the 2020 season, as well as make sure the Gators could get in a full camp.
With camp ending this week, that leaves nearly six months until the first game. What will the Gators do now?
"Spring practice ends and guys are out on the road recruiting in May and you’re still in the time to watch your spring cut-ups," said Dan Mullen. "Then in June you have a lot of extra time and you’re doing your camps and there’s some visits. For us this year, you got to look, we had January and the beginning of February to get that cut-up review so we kind of shifted the calendar to then. Now we did spring practice a little bit earlier. Some of the stuff you would be doing in June with your spring cut-ups, you’re moving that into April. May, the guys aren’t out on the road recruiting so we’re doing a lot more of our February, March offseason stuff at that point. June, where normally you had some camps and visit and you’re mix and matching, my understanding, I mean June’s going to be an onslaught of just non-stops kids desperate go visit because they haven’t had the chance to visit anywhere. So it’s just going to be non-stop visiting recruiting. A lot of it was just set around trying to reset the schedule. I don’t know if there’s any more free time, there might be less free time this year to be honest with you because of how June is going to play out, and depending what they do if they’re going to keep a dead period. You have that dead period at the end of June and July where you can actually go see your family at some point, as a coach. I don’t know if they keep that or don’t keep that. They haven’t let us know yet. I have to then try to squeeze a little bit of family time in before that hits, if they eliminate that dead period for the coaching staff. It’s all just trying to balance the schedule and make it all fit with what we have to work with.”
Recruiting dead period ending?
College coaches have been dealing with a recruiting dead period that has extended to over a year. Florida hasn't been allowed to host recruits on campus for more than a year, but that seems to be coming to an end shortly.
"I’m just curious as to how they’re going to go about it. There’s still just so many questions. Is it June 1 and life back to normal? Does it include the summer dead period? Is it official visits, unofficial visits, camps, everything? So I think the tricky part for us… it’s going to be great to do that and I know kids are dying and excited to get here. The balance of how that works because I think one thing there will be a mad rush as soon as that happens. That’s something we have to be smart and careful about with COVID to avoid a spike, to avoid issues within our team when there’s this mad rush of kids trying to get to every campus as fast as possible. It will be interesting. Hopefully, they’ll get us the information sooner rather than later so we can have the opportunity to put a strategy in place before it gets thrown on us.”
Explaining 2020 run game efficiency comments
Florida's offense looked like a pre-teen playing Madden. The Gators were an absurdly good passing attack but just the 11th ranked rushing attack in the conference. Mullen has continually said the Gators' were efficient when running the ball, to which many reply, "when?"
If you look at the base numbers it's not great. Florida ran for just 131.25 yards-per-game, 12 touchdowns, and 4.29 per carry. In a vacuum, Florida wasn't efficient but if you listen to Mullen explain the way the Gators graded their running attack it makes more sense.
"You don't go yards per attempt. You go each individual play, alright? And then you're looking at the percentage of plays where you rush for four yards plus, but then there is situations and other situations that it's less than that. So it's whatever your rushing gain is on a specific play within a specific situation, okay, and then within that situation, the percentage of the times that you are efficient."
