Gators Head Coach Dan Mullen Details Spring Football, Lack of Spring Game
Spring football is back in Gainesville (Fla.) as the Florida Gators get set to take the 2021 football season by storm.
With that, Gators head coach Dan Mullen held his first press conference since the end of the season following the team's 55-20 loss to Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl in December of last season. Mullen addressed a variety of topics including moving spring football up within the schedule, and the lack of a Spring Game, the annual Orange and Blue game.
Typically, spring football begins in March, but the Gators will host its first practice this week on Feb. 18, nearly a full month before last year's start date of March 16 (it should be noted that last year's spring football was canceled due to COVID-19). With the youth of the roster and a lack of traveling during recruiting in January, Florida is able to move the date up quite a bit.
"So you have the opportunity to get a jump start on all of our different player film evaluations, recruiting film evaluations, do the recruiting Zoom calls and all the phone calls," Mullen said today of the benefits the team had due to a lack of travel during recruiting in Jan.
"But there’s still time in the day when the whole coaching staff is not around traveling so you’re able to get cut-up reviews done, getting everything in wrapping up the season done earlier."
Evaluation within a football program is certainly an ongoing process and Florida is simply getting a leg-up on doing just that, able to get players in and understanding what is expected out of them, and how to improve sooner rather than later.
"We have a lot of guys in our program that haven’t been through a spring ball," Mullen said. "So there’s a couple [of] different ways to look at it as you get into the offseason. We’ve had time to accelerate it, but within the spring you have time to review cut-ups, to watch, to teach and then you go practice it and then you review those cut-ups again."
Florida players will be able to watch and dissect their own cut-ups this spring due to the change in schedule. Typically, a player will watch and evaluate others to learn what to do themselves, but Mullen says a player has to be very mentally mature to learn that way, and with the young players currently on the roster, it is simply better for them to see it for themselves allows for a better understanding moving forward.
"So by having the spring ball earlier, we’ll be able to start watching the spring cut-ups earlier with the players of guys that maybe haven’t played a lot that have not had that experience and they get to watch themselves running our offense and our defense."
The Gators are going to undergo plenty of changes, both offensive and defensively this season. While some players remain, plenty of core players such as quarterback Kyle Trask, tight end Kyle Pitts, left tackle Stone Forsythe, and many more on offense are gone, for example, are gone.
The schematic changes Florida will make to both sides of the football could be significant, and the sooner the players get to learn and understand, the better.
"We want to get that stuff on film so they can see that and we can coach and teach off of it. So that’s some of the reasons why we’re doing it.”
While a lack of a natural spring football schedule will not impact the number of practices the team is allowed, the circumstances surrounding why there able to be a change in schedule - COVID19 -, has once again altered the program's annual Orange and Blue spring game, something Mullen says is typically a celebration for the players to see fans, faces and to get excited about next year's team.
Without the Orange and Blue game, Florida will resort to scrimmages similarly to how it was handled last season, a trade-off that Mullen is OK with.
"There's going to be a big plus to that of getting some more things accomplished in that scrimmage than you normally would in a spring game, which is kind of a little bit more of an exhibition showcase."
Spring football is here a bit early as the groundhog clearly didn't see its shadow this year. It will officially wrap up on March 20, according to Mullen with 15 practices in between. The time for coaches, media members and fans to see the 2021 Gators is officially upon us.
