OFFER: Purchase a monthly subscription, receive two additional months for FREE!

For more than a month, the Florida football team has been working out — and now practicing — without any positive COVID-19 tests.

The University Athletic Association released the updated numbers Tuesday, with all 197 tests on players coming back negative in August. UF coach Dan Mullen said no one on his team has tested positive since early July.

“I’m really happy our guys have made great decisions. We’re still at zero positive tests,” Mullen said Tuesday. “The one thing that’s always the biggest concern is the more free time we give the guys.

“Statistically, what it’s looked like is while we’re doing football, football is very safe. When we send guys away, maybe there’s issues. The more we send them away, the more probably nerve-racking it gets for us. But our guys have done a great job of making decisions, taking care of themselves.”

The Gators had just one student-athlete test positive in August out of 479 total tests in all sports. Mullen’s players have eliminated all cases after having some during the first few weeks of workouts.

The football program has administered 359 tests since players returned to campus May 26 with 21 positives; but again, none dating back to early July.

Now they face the challenge of keeping their numbers down once students return to campus for the fall semester, which begins Monday.

“We gotta be smart in our decision making, we gotta be smart in what we do. We kind of — to me — control our own future,” Mullen said. “We've shown that playing football is safe. That’s what we've shown. So that's part of it. Now, we gotta make smart decisions on what we're doing — and not doing — when we're doing more than football. So that's going to be a big thing as we move forward.

“To sit there and say that, ‘Hey when students come back to campus there’s gonna be zero positives on our campus', I mean that's kind of ridiculous to even think that way, you know what I mean? So what we gotta do is trust our local health people. And our students, people try to be smart, make good decisions and keep everything under control as best we can.”

Since May 26, UF has administered 809 tests on all student-athletes with 35 total positives.