On Tuesday afternoon Dan Mullen said that the University of Florida has proven that playing football is safe in the pandemic and the numbers released by the school prove it.
According to numbers released by the university on Tuesday night, the Gators have administered 197 COVID-19 tests and returned zero positives in the month of August. The university has administered 359 tests since May 26 with 21 positive results. Most of those positive tests on the football team came when the team was in a voluntary workout period.
“Statistically, what it’s looked like is while we’re doing football, football is very safe. When we send guys away, maybe there are issues,” Mullen said on a Zoom call with reporters. “The more we send them away, the more probably nerve-racking it gets for us. But our guys have done a great job of making decisions, taking care of themselves.”
The Gators have been in a quasi-bubble while on campus this summer. When classes were moved online in the spring most students went home and when the football team returned to campus there were only a few student-athletes and teams on campus. Across the country, as students return to campus, there have been spikes of positive tests. North Carolina made it 10 days with students on campus before a spike in positive cases led them to change fall courses to all online.
It’s not reasonable to think that Florida will continue to go by with no positive tests but that’s something Mullen and the university are preparing for.
“To sit there and say that ‘hey when students come back to campus there’s gonna be zero positives on our campus’, I mean that’s kinda ridiculous to even think that way, you know what I mean? So, what we gotta do is trust our local health people, and our students, people try to be smart, make good decisions,” Mullen said. “You know and keep everything under control as best we can. The (positivity) rate is currently going down, and the big one for us, our guys have been responsible, we’ve shown football’s pretty safe.”