Why Did the Florida Gators Practice on Monday?
Note: This story is written in editorial format expressing the views of Sports Illustrated-AllGators publisher Zach Goodall.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin was transparent with the media on Wednesday, but his revelation that 21 football players and two assistant coaches tested positive for COVID-19 begs the question: Did UF take action quickly enough?
The outbreak has led to the postponement of Florida's Week 7 game against LSU at home this Saturday until Dec. 12, and for UF to "indefinitely" pause all football team activities.
The exact cause of Florida's COVID-19 outbreak has yet to be determined, according to Stricklin. Stricklin made a note when speaking with the media that some athletes had experienced symptoms and didn't report them prior to traveling to Texas A&M—however, he acknowledged that cases could stem from the trip.
Stricklin and the university can justifiably be frustrated with the lack of transparency from players - although he believes it could be as simple as not understanding symptoms of COVID-19 when the symptoms can compare to a common cold or allergies.
RELATED: Gators COVID-19 Outbreak Illustrates Vulnerability Within Protocols
The issues seep deeper, however. Stricklin prepared a timeline of events after the Gators returned from Bryan-College Station, Texas, including when Florida first began to realize there was a potential coronavirus issue rising.
"We do a round of testing Sunday morning as part of the SEC surveillance program. I got a call early Monday morning from Paul Silvestri, our trainer, to let me know that we have a number of players call him Sunday night reporting symptoms: headache, fatigue, scratchy throat, that kind of thing. And so he said, ‘I haven’t gotten tests back, but I am a little concerned that we may have something going on here.’ They were supposed to have a team meeting at 8 o’clock Monday morning and they called that off and told the players to standby that there may be an afternoon meeting. We started to get the tests back and it started being positives. We decided to test again Monday morning – I think Mullen has touched on that, that we tested every day this week in an attempt to get our arms around any potential spread."
Stricklin and the UAA responded rapidly to the original threat by canceling Monday morning's 8:00 a.m. ET team meeting while the university awaited test results. Considering Florida had already traveled together to and from Texas A&M over the weekend, the last thing that needed to happen was another gathering to further potential coronavirus exposure.
Meanwhile, the media was made aware that Mullen would hold a press conference at 9:59 a.m. ET on Monday morning, a hair under two hours after the then-canceled meeting was scheduled for. During Monday's press conference, Mullen called Florida "a model of safety" for how the university has handled COVID-19 and playing sports, in response to backlash to his "Pack the Swamp [Ben Hill Griffin Stadium]" comments from Saturday.
At this point, Mullen had already known of the potential outbreak. Yet, he failed to apologize for the insensitivity surrounding his plea to fill a stadium in the middle of a pandemic, suggesting UF had created and maintained a safe environment while players were quickly beginning to quarantine throughout the program.
Which begs the question: Knowing the realistic possibility of a looming outbreak, why did the Gators practice Monday evening? And the afternoon meeting Stricklin floated, did it end up occurring?
Stricklin didn't expand much upon Florida's Monday evening practice, saying at the time Florida's medical staff "was making a decision based on what they knew, and they had quarantined a tremendous amount of individuals."
But is that acceptable when a meeting was canceled earlier the same day? In the span of several hours – a span which pales in comparison to the incubation period of the virus, which can be anywhere from two to 14 days – how could Florida have been sure everyone needing to be quarantined was away from the facility on Monday night?
As reported by Graham Hall of The Gainesville Sun on Wednesday morning, the team was optimistic that there were some false positives among the originally-reported 19 cases across the team. Whether or not the possibility of false positives factored into the decision to practice on Monday is unknown, however Mullen said on Sept. 21 that an assistant coach had dealt with a false-positive test, proven as such after three consecutive negative test results in as many days.
We won't know for sure what led to Florida's mass outbreak of coronavirus cases until contact tracing has run its full course, and perhaps that won't even provide a clear picture as to how coronavirus spread within the Gators football program. What we do know is UF was aware of the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak, took an early preventative measure, but proceeded to gather as a team with this knowledge at hand.
"It [COVID-19] can sneak up on you in a hurry," said Stricklin on Tuesday. "The key thing is you’ve got to have the ability to push the brake when things start to occur like we’re seeing right now."
The biggest issue is Florida only tapped its brake, only to re-accelerate and hit a wall.
