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an article posted Thursday by The Athletic, Mora touched on some of what players, as he understood it, had been through prior to his arrival.
“This was the first team to cancel football for COVID, right off the bat, and the head coach left for eight months and went to Florida,” Mora said of Edsall, according to The Athletic. “These kids told me they didn’t see him for eight months. They were up here stuck in dorms and working out in pods, eating by themselves and they didn’t have any games.”
UConn held spring practice in February of 2020. Campus shut down along with most of the world upon the arrival of COVID-19 in March of that year and remained virtually empty for months. Very few members of the football program — coaches or players — were on campus until the team reconvened in August in advance of a preseason camp that never took place.
UConn announced on Aug. 5, 2020 — the day for which the first practice was scheduled — that it would cancel its season due to COVID-19. The Huskies did hold practices during the September-November time frame. Games were not played but the program was not shut down. Edsall has long owned a home in Jacksonville, Fla.
Asked Saturday about Mora’s quote, and whether there was anything abnormal about the time Edsall spent away from the program in 2020, Benedict had no comment. <-