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    • Florida Football Starts Fall Camp With Optimism Due to Experience and Competition
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    Florida Football Starts Fall Camp With Optimism Due to Experience and Competition

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    The report day for the Florida football team’s fall camp brought with it the optimism that third-year coach Billy Napier has been exuding all summer.

    The Florida Gators enter their third fall camp under Napier with 14 returning starters on offense and defense, led by quarterback Graham Mertz, and more than 41,000 snaps of experience.

    “This camp will be the most competitive camp we’ve had since I’ve been at the University of Florida,” Napier said. “We have more competitive depth. We have more experience. We definitely have a challenge ahead of us that we’re looking forward to.”

    Florida begins the first of 17 practices over 22 days on Wednesday in preparation for its Aug. 31 season opener at The Swamp against in-state rival Miami (3:30 p.m., ABC).

    Napier spoke to the team on Tuesday morning and expects 120 of the 132 scholarship and walk-on players on the roster to participate in fall workouts.

    “There’s never going to be a carbon copy of this team,” Florida center Jake Slaughter said. “I feel like this team has definitely changed. We want to start fast and finish strong, that was a big thing this summer that we pushed for. I feel like a lot of guys are ready to go and compete. There’s going to be a lot of competition on all fronts.”

    Slaughter said there’s no added sense of urgency going into the opener against the Hurricanes, the first of 11 Power Four conference opponents on UF’s bear of a 12-game schedule. ESPN’s Football Power Index has rated UF’s schedule as the toughest in college football.

    “There’s going to be a sense of urgency no matter what,” Slaughter said. “Being ready for the first half or the second half of the schedule is not something we think about, I think. There’s always going to be a sense of urgency to play our best game on Day One.”

    What Florida Football Team’s Fall Camp Will Look Like

    Napier said he follows a model for pre-season training, making small adjustments before each season.

    “We’ve adapted,” Napier said. “I think we have access to more information now. The sports science piece, the wearable technology, just the information we have on each individual player.”

    Napier said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s Chief Medical Officer, visited UF’s campus last spring to discuss how to run training camps in a competitive format.

    “We’ll expose the players at different times of the day in this training camp,” Napier said. “We’ll have practices at 10:30, 2:30 and 6:30. We’ll obviously have some flex games where we’re on the field at all three of those times. We’ll also have some morning kickoffs, three of which are on the schedule. I think it’s healthy for our players to experience all of that.”

    Florida players will come to camp motivated to erase the sting of last season’s 5-7 campaign, which included a five-game losing streak to end the regular season and resulted in UF missing a bowl game for the first time since 2017.

    “We’ve got a core of players coming back,” Napier said. “They’ve had a taste of it. They’ve been there for those four quarters in a row. In the final stages we didn’t quite finish the way we wanted to.

    “And I think that’s ultimately the motivation behind this: they know it’s just there and it helps us get over the hump,”

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