Would a preseason game in college football benefit the Florida Gators?

You’re asking for something to go wrong

The one thing that all football players and fans have in common is their hatred toward injuries. They’re unfair and can damage a player’s chances at getting to play for his school and moving on to the next level.

So do the positives really outweigh the risk of playing a full game against a different school? In practice with your own team, coaches can limit hits and protect their quarterbacks. That isn’t true when you line it up against another squad.

If the Florida Gators played UCF or FSU in preseason, there’s no guarantee that you can stay healthy. It’s well documented that those teams don’t like UF, so they wouldn’t pull up when they laid a hit.

Could spoil game plans

Before a big game, coaches will sometimes limit the plays they run on offense and schemes they show on defense, so that they can have the element of surprise for their next match up.

With this in mind, 1 of 2 things will happen in a preseason game. 1: A team’s offense is out there for the entire country to see and they can game plan for it before the season starts. Or 2: they are conservative with the playbook so the game is boring and pointless for the team.

Coaches would likely opt to not show their cards and just run base plays in the preseason. For obvious reasons, this isn’t good practice for their teams, and they can’t work on what they plan to do when the real games start.

Sure, you get to practice your snap count in front of a loud crowd and can start dealing with noise, but is it worth it if you have to run a peewee playbook?

This is especially relevant this year for the Florida Gators, as it’s Billy Napier’s first year. It would be a bad idea to expose what he plans to do offensively and defensively before he gets to coach a real game.

Is this really something fans would want to see?

Sure, there would be tons of eyes on these games to start, as people have been dying for football and there’s nothing like the passion of an SEC fanbase.

But when the second quarter rolls around, and the subs likely start to come in, is anybody going to hang around and watch to the end?

Maybe the winning fans would watch – a win is a win. But if your team is down 10 to open up the second half, and you see Frankie Picks-a-lot trotting out there to run the offense, are you really going to stick around?