Jon Sumrall insists Florida will meet winning standard: ‘We gotta wake the beast up’
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Jon Sumrall was never an assistant coach at Florida, but it doesn’t mean the guy who came to Gainesville from Tulane doesn’t know about the Gators’ winning tradition.
That tradition of contending for SEC and national championships has been lost at The Swamp in recent years, and Sumrall wants to see it come back — like, now. The 43-year-old Texas native used Saturday’s Orange and Blue Spring Game stage to talk about what has been missing at Florida and what he wants to return.
“We gotta wake the beast up. It’s time we wake this thing up. This is a sleeping giant,” Jon Sumrall told reporters in Gainesville on Saturday. “And I’m telling you right now it isn’t a matter of if we’re going to win here, it’s how fast we’re going to win. It’s coming.”
Sumrall has done plenty of winning himself in his 2 previous head coaching stops. He’s gone a combined 43-12 during his 4 seasons, with a 23-4 record at Troy in 2022 and 2023 followed by a 20-8 mark at Tulane in 2024 and 2025 before his arrival at Florida.
He knows it won’t be an easy transition back to that winning, but Sumrall was here to say on Saturday that he’s hell bent on getting that tradition back going as soon as possible. The spring game was Saturday’s stage, but soon enough the games will count for real this fall.
Sumrall desperately wants to get Florida back to college football relevance in 2026, and here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about the elite teams it believes have the best shot to make the College Football Playoff this season:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
