On Saturday, an offseason that felt like an eternity will finally come to an end. The Florida Gators will be back in action on the gridiron at Ole Miss in what will technically be their first true road game in a season opener since playing Miami in the Orange Bowl during Week 1 in 1987.
UF was originally slated to take on Eastern Washington in its first game on Sept. 5, but the start of the season was delayed three weeks and the SEC moved to a conference-only, 10-game schedule.
Now, the Gators draw the Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway in Oxford, Miss., in their opener, facing a first-year coach and familiar face in Lane Kiffin, the former head coach at Tennessee and offensive coordinator at Alabama.
Speaking to the media, UF coach Dan Mullen said his team is excited to start the season, though it knows it will be unfamiliar in many ways.
“I’m excited to see how we respond and how we come out and play,” Mullen said. “I think everybody’s excited to play, excited to get out there on the field and go, and I’m excited to see how we respond and how we handle it, you know, because it’s a little bit different. It’s going to be a different environment that we play in, obviously going on the road in the SEC is always a big challenge, but, you know, the environments and how those are going to be played out differently… I’m excited, we haven’t played in forever.”
Mullen said that there will be significant changes to how UF travels and conducts its pregame activities in order to maintain social distancing and prevent players and staff from contracting COVID-19.
Asked about the current impact of the novel coronavirus on the program, Mullen declined to go into specifics.
“I’m not going to get into that stuff,” he said. “That’s not for me to get into, I don’t think. I give you guys the injury report, but all of that stuff and how that works, I’m going to need to brush up on all my medical stuff of how we would let people know if there was anybody of that nature.”
As of Sept. 21, the football program had seen 10 total positive cases during the month of September out of 514 tests issued during that time span, a positivity rate of just under two percent.
We will likely get another update to this information before kickoff this week, but for now, it appears all systems are “go” for UF to open the season against Ole Miss on Saturday.
The full clip of Mullen can be seen below.
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