U. of Florida hopes to resume football activities Monday after COVID-19 outbreak

U. of Florida hopes to resume football activities Monday after COVID-19 outbreak
UPI

Oct. 21 (UPI) — Florida football coach Dan Mullen, who has tested positive for COVID-19, said he hopes the Gators will resume activities as soon as Monday amid an outbreak that has caused two game postponements.

The Gators coach remains in quarantine at home after he announced Saturday that he had tested positive. He spoke to reporters Wednesday during a Southeastern Conference teleconference.

The Gators outbreak, which has included more than 20 players with positive COVID-19 test results, led to the postponement of Florida’s game against Missouri, planned for Saturday in Gainesville, Fla. Mullen said Wednesday that another player turned up positive after Tuesday’s round of testing.

Florida players and coaches have been apart since Oct. 13 due to the outbreak.

“Moving forward, we won’t be at full capacity as a team, but we feel comfortable our numbers will be at a point where we can play the game,” Mullen said, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Florida began the 2020 season Sept. 26 at Ole Miss and played games against South Carolina and Texas A&M before the program paused football activities.

The Southeastern Conference — whose members are Florida, LSU, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi State, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn and Kentucky — then postponed the Gators’ Oct. 17 game against LSU.

Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said last week the Gators would have had fewer than 50 scholarship players available if they tried to play last Saturday because of those in quarantine or on the COVID injury list.

The SEC announced in September a threshold for member schools to have at least 53 scholarship players available for games. The conference also specified minimum thresholds for scholarship offensive linemen, quarterbacks and defensive linemen.

Impacted schools have the option to play below the thresholds, but also can have the games rescheduled or forfeit, pending conference approval.

“I mean, I’m doing fine,” Mullen said, according to 247 Sports. “The team for the most part, very similar.

“I think the majority of our guys have very minor symptoms, and then what we did is — kind of following a lot of the NFL model and, out of the abundance of caution, we’ve used this whole time — the program has completely closed to get back to zero positive tests.

“So we’re going to be closed until Monday. We’re going to, even the coaches, everybody’s working remotely until next Monday and then we’ll open back up, hopefully, at that point.”

The Missouri-Florida game has been moved to Oct. 31 at the Gators’ Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. The Florida-LSU game has been moved to Dec. 12.

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