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There isn’t a game until Halloween for a reason, folks. This shouldn’t surprise anyone either. The total number of COVID-19 cases in the month of October for the Florida Gators continues to rise.
It took quite the jump too.
According to the latest COVID-19 report released by director of football communications Skip Powers, the number of cases this month are up to 31. The Oct. 12 testing update reported only six cases. That means, in the last week, the number of COVID cases on the team jump up by 25 cases among the student-athletes.
This number does not include cases among the coaching staff, such as head coach Dan Mullen. The whole “pack the swamp” thing has been milked enough, so we’ll leave that be.
The Effects of the Rising Number of Cases
As a result of the positive tests on the team, the Gators have been basically out of commission. There was no game against LSU back on Saturday. That will now be played on Dec. 12.
This mess doesn’t stop here.
Because those who test positive have to quarantine for 14 days, there won’t be a game against Mizzou this upcoming Saturday either. That’s been moved to Halloween, and the traditional bye week before Florida-Georgia is now out the window. That game is the very next week on Nov. 7.
The impact of these positive tests is already impacting the entire season. These future games are NOT in the clear either. Even if zero Gators test positive for the rest of the season, a game could be postponed or canceled for other reasons. For all we know, Mizzou sees positive tests, and a game that should have already been out of the way has to be moved again.
It could be Florida-Tennessee can’t be played on Dec. 5. What then? You can’t just play the week after because Florida-LSU was moved to the following week. On top of that, the SEC Championship Game is the week after Florida-LSU. Does the SEC Championship game gets pushed back if key schools in the running need to play another game?
These questions already need to be asked because of an outbreak in the middle of October.
It’s too late to stop the first domino from falling. If it was able to be stopped, there would have been games back on Saturday and the upcoming one. If you’ve ever played with dominoes before, you know they keep falling until each one has fallen flat on the table.
