Florida Gators HC Dan Mullen Seeking Answers on Roster Limits From SEC

The SEC and all of college football will be quite different this year. There will be fans in attendance at some institutions, while others will have no fans in attendance, there will also be more restrictions; gameday operations will function, but pregame, halftime shows, and other events will be slashed, at least according to the latest SEC announcement on game guidelines.

While many of the operational aspects of gameday have been addressed, to an extent, Gators head coach Dan Mullen is seeking answers on a variety of roster-limitation rules, including the traveling party rules, which dictated how many players the visiting institution can travel to take part in a given game.

"In a normal year, right, the visiting team has 70 players and the home team has 80," Mullen explained during his virtual press conference on Saturday. "This is a year that should be corrected, that both teams should at least be equal, with the opportunity, because you might be having to sit guys out for games, you know what I mean?"

Many teams conduct their rosters and decide who to bring and who not to bring for various reasons. Typically, however, those reasons don't come with outside-of-football factors. This year, due to COVID-19, teams will need could face the possibility of being without several, or dozens of players due to quarantine policies for any given game.

As Mullen explains it, if the Gators travel with 70 players and 10 have to quarantine when they get back for various reasons, the team will now have to have 20 players at home who haven't played or received an adequate amount of gameday work to maintain an equal competitive advantage to whichever team the Gators are facing that week.

"And, maybe a guy that’s never played, right, and we’re going to ask him, or a guy that maybe he’s only on a special team[er] and now he’s going to have a huge defensive role because someone’s quarantining," Mullen said. "Now, I’ve got to bring someone that’s never played special teams to teach that role to, because this guy’s got to play defense, when if you’d let it all be equal and at 80 all the time, you’d be able to prep for all of those things in advance."

These are just a few of the intricacies of this year's college football season that could present an issue to the competitive nature of the sport itself. If there are teams that cannot field a full roster, or do not have experienced enough players simply due to the roster limitations and travel-party limitations set by the SEC, there will be issues.

"I don’t know why they didn’t want to go there, again, but I don’t know why certain decisions get made. We’re not really in the mix on that stuff, people just make decisions.”

Last week, Mullen was asked about the new NCAA waiver that will grant all fall athletes an extra year of eligibility, essentially a redshirt year in which they can play an unlimited number of snaps. However, the SEC has still yet to make a ruling on how many more players teams will be able to field, which is ultimately the issue that's been presented by Mullen today.

For Mullen, the additional year of eligibility was the "right move," he said last week. "I think it was a great idea for the NCAA to do that for these guys. I think it certainly helps make decisions for the guys of what they're going to do a lot easier."

However, the question remains, how will the SEC conduct its changes to accommodate for the NCAA's changes?

"You know, you have conference-only games [that] have very different restrictions than NCAA games. So we'll see if the conference really goes to the NCAA rule and starts to loosen it up as well for the safety of the players. I think it would be a really good idea for the conference for the situation we’re at we should have the same number of guys being able to play from each team."