Spring Practice Kicks Off A Month Early As Florida Gators Look To Accelerate the Learning Curve
After a season unlike any other, why should spring practice be different? The year 2020 taught the Florida Gators—and for that matter most everyone—how to adapt and find a way through a situation with no road map. With those lessons shaping what continues to feel like a new normal, Head Coach Dan Mullen and the Gators elected to change spring practice as well.
Typically, the four week spring practice block begins in mid-March, running through mid-April. The NCAA allows for 15 practices over a course of 30 days. That stretch of 30 days though? Well that’s up to the program. Which is why the Gators took the field this week to begin their preparations for the 2021 season.
The decision, according to Mullen, was a result of “a couple of factors.”
"We weren’t on the road recruiting in January,” Mullen explained this week.
“Not that we weren’t recruiting constantly, but you’re not gone all day on the road. 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. 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.”
The other factor? Simply being in Florida. While much of the rest of the country is blanketed in snow, the sun has been out and delivering temperatures ranging from the high 50’s to low 80’s all week.
“I did click on the weather channel and saw that I’m very happy we live in the state of Florida right now because it looks awful cold in a lot of other places around the country,” joked Mullen.
“I hope everybody is safe with where they are in the country. So, we have that opportunity to do it.”
The biggest factor though? The need to teach much of the roster simply how to practice.
Take Kaiir Elam for example. One could justifiably argue he returns as the most important, valuable and experienced player on the Gators roster; at the very least on the defense. And he’s never been through a spring practice in college. He wasn’t an early enrollee his freshman year, meaning he came in the summer of 2019. He then lost his 2020 spring practice when the world grinded to a halt two days before the Gators were set to take the field last March.
On top of that, practices in season last fall were significantly stripped down. As many drills as possible were required to be contactless and the days resembled walk-throughs more than actual physical practices, as teams were required to limit the spread of COVID-19.
As such—still using Elam as an example—the star corner has had only one stretch in his college career of what could be called a normal practice time.
Combined with the fact that there is clearly improvements that need to be made following the end of the 2020 season (and a three game losing streak that featured an inspiring close championship game, bookended by two embarrassing displays), Mullen and staff elected to take better advantage of the time before the restrictive summer interaction rules began.
“We have a lot of guys in our program that haven’t been through a spring ball. So there’s a couple different ways to look at it as you get into the offseason,” explains Mullen.
"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. One of the things we wanted to do, I think guys learn a lot better when they watch themselves. It takes a lot of maturity for players to grow and learn to watch other people do things to learn how to make yourself better. You do that, spend a lot of time doing that and teaching that. But I’m going to tell you what, the guys are much more attentive when they’re watching themselves do it and you’re correcting them and they’re seeing themselves perform within the offensive or defensive or special teams scheme.
“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.”
This move also gives coaches more time to watch the cut-ups as well according to Mullen. That will be necessary in preparation for the fall since the coach says they will”make some changes offensively and defensively schematically around this year’s players with some of the things that we talk about. We want to get that stuff on film so they can see that and we can coach and teach off of it.”
With the Florida Gators back on the field—and weeks before anyone else—the teaching has officially begun for this young team to be put to the test.
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