Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — With an open date to self-evaluate, Florida coach Dan Mullen took full advantage of the Gators' bye weekend. 

He shot 77. 

"My son was the scorekeeper," Mullen said of his latest sub-80 golf round Wednesday. "I don't know, I must've shot from some up-tees or hit a couple lucky shots or he must've miscounted one or two strokes." 

Whatever the case, the outing must have been a pleasant one for the coach, especially with a hard-fought Week 0 victory over a solid Miami club already tucked away in his pocket. While the Mullens were on the links, the rest of college football opened their 2019 seasons, with several Southern states casting a worrisome eye at Hurricane Dorian spinning in the Atlantic. Both passed. And though UF had a couple days of school canceled this week, the 11th-ranked Gators (1-0) were on campus and back at work Monday and Tuesday, as their routine normalized and collective attention turned to Saturday night's 2019 home opener against Tennessee-Martin (1-0) at Spurrier/Florida Field. 

A date against an FCS opponent may not get the juices flowing like the showdown against the Hurricanes last month, but it does represent the next opportunity for the Gators — not to mention this team's first time in the "Swamp" — and a chance to start fixing what ailed the squad during a sloppy, mistake-filled win in Orlando. 

Mullen calls it "playing to our standard." 

UF did at times against the Hurricanes, and did not at others. 

"[With] our ability to make plays to win the game? We played to our standard in Game 1," he said. "Was it as clean as we want it to be? No. Did we make some critical errors with turnovers, red-zone scoring, the missed tackles? Some of that wasn't to our standard. So, are we cleaning those things up? That's been the focus to me." 

And, thus, the team. 

After the wild (and weird) extra-early start to the season — the Aug. 24 UF-Miami game was the earliest game in college football history — Mullen gave his staff and players four days off to rejuvenate and re-energize. Some took trips out of town, some stuck around. Some, as referenced, played golf. Others watched football. There were some interesting games. 

Take what happened in Knoxville, Tenn., for example. 

The Volunteers, thinking big and talking about competing in the Southeastern Conference Eastern Division, got flattened by Georgia State, 38-30, a low-level FBS foe that won two games last season and was picked to finish last in their division of the Sun Belt Conference. The Gators took notice, just as they did as fellow SEC East brothers Missouri lost at Wyoming and South Carolina fell on a neutral field to a North Carolina team coming off a two-win season. 

"Teams like Georgia State, they're very good teams with very good athletes, so people got to understand you can't take any team for granted," senior linebacker David Reese said. "I feel like we have enough seniors on our team to know how important it is to be 1-0 every week." Enter the Skyhawks, an FCS opponent coming off a 42-20 defeat of Northwestern (La.) State in which they scored the game's final 28 points. Offensively, tailback Peyton Logan rushed 13 times for 148 yards and two touchdowns. Defensively, Mullen mentioned UT-Martin's base 3-5-3 — or "Bear Front" — that will present a unique look to a UF offense that had trouble both pass-blocking and creating rush lanes against Miami, albeit a Canes unit that returned a number of players from one of the best defenses in the country last season. 

"You can't take anyone lightly and you have to be prepared to work week in and week out," senior wide receiver Josh Hammond said. "Bunch of teams got upset in Week 1. Definitely, take the approach that every team is going to come in and try to win the football game. No one plans to lose. We still game plan as if it is the No. 1 team in the country."

UT-Martin, out of the Ohio Valley Conference, will be physically outmatched, without a doubt. Mullen and his coaches, though, will be watching what their players are doing, all the while looking for a cleaner product than, say, the one that produced around 20 missed tackles against Miami. 

"How you fix it is is within the intensity of how you practice and fit and finish and wrap and thud in practice — that's the best way to fix it," Mullen said. "In every part of practice, I mean, you can't get enough reps. I'm one who can never get enough reps of anything, so if you don't finish or go hard in a rep, you miss that one opportunity and you can never get enough."

In that particular byte, Mullen was addressing missed tackles, but he just as easily could have been speaking to penalties (UF had nine for 100 yards vs. UM), turnovers (four) or lack of a running game (28 carries, just 54 yards). 

The goal Saturday will be on doing things right, but doing them much, much better, play in and play out, and improving habits in execution and technique.

"There's a lot of things that everybody can get better at," said fourth-year junior quarterback Feleipe Franks, who passed for 254 yards, two touchdowns and rushed for a score against the Canes, but also had three of the four turnovers (two interceptions, plus a fumble at the UM 5). "For me, personally, there's always room to improve as a quarterback; leadership-wise, this, that and the other. There's a bunch of things to improve on. But I think Coach Mullen and the team, we're headed in the right direction. We played fairly well, but a lot of things we can clean up. I think we're going to progress and get better. That's kind of our main focus right now."