2 BITS: Muschamp gets season, UF drug testing

1 » During a radio interview with Mike Bianchi on 740 The Game out of Orlando, Florida, this week, Florida Gators athletic director Jeremy Foley said head coach Will Muschamp will keep his job through the end of the season, at which point Foley will make a decision on the future of the program. “You never judge or evaluate a program based on one game or one season,” Foley told Bianchi. “That’s just not how we do things here. We’re going to evaluate where we’re headed — where the players are, how is recruiting going, what type of staff we have, are we better? That’s going to be plain for all of us to see, but it’s also going to be played out over the course of 11 games, and we’ll see where we are when we get to the end of the season.” Florida’s defense, helmed by Muschamp, has allowed nearly 1,100 yards of offense in its last two games, coughing up a school-record 645 yards to Alabama last Saturday. The Gators (2-1, 1-1 SEC) next face the Tennessee Volunteers on Saturday, Oct. 4; Florida will be looking to extend a nine-game winning streak in the series.

2 » A non-Gators story making the rounds on Thursday was a report from the Austin American-Statesman, which uncovered that under Charlie Strong, Texas has been drug testing is players at more than twice the rate it did under Mack Brown. The Statesman reports that the Longhorns averaged 104 drug tests per year under Brown from 2010-13 but are now on pace to test players nearly 2-3 times each in 2014; Texas has already administered 188 tests and is on pace for 282 before season’s end.

Bianchi, doubling up on his news-making this week with this post in the Orlando Sentinel, contacted Florida to find out how often UF drug tests its players by comparison.

The results were eye-opening: Last year, the Gators drug-tested football players 406 times. The year before it was 377. The year before that it was 350. This year, UF has already tested its football players 300 times, which puts them on pace for another year of 400-plus drug tests.

In other words, Florida drug tested its players nearly four times as often as Texas in 2013 and is still on pace to do so 25 percent more than UT in 2014.