Dan Mullen gathered his team up before the first practice of fall camp on Friday. After making sure every eye in the room was on him, he gave the first of many powerful messages to come this fall.
He said the Florida Gators should be a good team in 2018. They have the tools to do it, so they should.
But should isn’t good enough.
“Should” is no longer an acceptable term in the Florida locker room. Instead, it will be replaced with “must” from now on.
“Everyone talks about they should,” Mullen said. “I should lose weight, I should get up and run, I should study an extra 10 minutes, I should eat healthier, right? There’s a lot of shoulds out there. When it becomes a must, you’re going to succeed. And I talk about it. We should be a great team this year. We should. But when everybody within our locker room changes it to ‘we must be a great team’ and has a desperate attitude and mindset towards it, that’s when we’ll become a great team.”
That message set the tone for the rest of the practice.
The Gators jumped right into it with a tough day of install, and it would have been easy for players’ minds to be anywhere but on the field. It was the first day back after a grueling summer, after all.
That was not the feeling Mullen got from his guys. He felt the excitement for a new season and the willingness to learn and get better.
“I’ve seen it with young men sometimes, you know what, they play because they’re good at football, and they’ve kind of been good at football and they think that’s what they should do,” he said. “That’s tough duty. When you play because you love the game, you become a much better player. Seems to me we have a bunch of guys who love the game of football. They love to be out there practicing.”
That’s a good thing, because expectations are high from this coaching staff. Nothing below the “relentless effort” they so often talk about will be accepted.
Mullen wants this team to be the toughest team in the SEC, both mentally and physically.
“We’re going to be a very physical football team how we play,” he said. “I love being a physical football team. I love people after games to know that they played Florida and just say ‘well that’s a little different, those kids are a little different when you have to play those games.’”
The Gators are getting in the right mindset early to make that expectation a reality.