Jim McElwain met with the media today for his weekly press conference, and delivered some good news on the injury front.
Starting safety Marcus Maye will make his season debut against Kentucky after being sidelined for three weeks with a hamstring injury. “He’ll be ready to roll, so that should help us moving forward there,” said McElwain. I should say so. Florida was torched through the air last week, as East Carolina threw for nearly 400 yards with their Air Raid offense; missing two starters in the secondary (Neal and Vernon Hargreaves) probably had a lot to do with that. And so getting one of them back should help a lot against a Kentucky team that runs a similar offense.
The other bit of good news on the injury front is that prized freshman offensive tackle Martez Ivey will return to practice this week. Ivey, who had his knee scoped a few weeks ago to clean up the aftereffects of a surgery that was performed while he was in high school, is a tremendous talent with off the charts athleticism. Freshman or not, he’ll provide a major boost for an offensive line that’s desperately trying to find dependable pieces in the rotation.
In other injury news, Vernon Hargreaves has been declared “questionable” by McElwain. Hargreaves apparently got nicked up during practice last week, and though there he was in warmups against East Carolina, catching punts and doing some jogging, he was indeed sidelined for the game. The Gators could obviously really use him against Kentucky, but whether or not they’ll get him is a question that will be answered later in the week.
Then there’s linebacker Alex Anzalone, who will have his shoulder monitored after aggravating an old injury from two years ago. McElwain called his shoulder injury “really unknown,” so like Hargreaves, we’ll have to wait until later in the week to get an answer on that.
