Jon Sumrall says his viral reaction to phone interruption at SEC Media Days wasn’t serious
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Jon Sumrall will have plenty of time when fall camp starts and when the season starts to be brutally serious as he tries to get Florida off the canvas and back into contention in the SEC.
But during an awkward moment at his session with reporters on Wednesday at SEC Media Days in Tampa, the first-year Gators head coach wanted everyone to know that the interpreted reaction to a cell phone going off wasn’t him being brutally serious. Instead, when the cell phone of that reporter or photographer went off during a question to Sumrall involving Lane Kiffin, Sumrall was being like Kiffin and injecting some comic relief into the moment.
“You would be kicked out of our team meeting. I swear,” Sumrall said at that chaotic moment. “You’re lucky. I’m not gonna throw this freaking podium right now. That drives me crazy.”
Naturally, everyone went crazy, too, reacting to Sumrall’s reaction, because it’s 2026 and it’s SEC Media Days, and this was Sumrall’s first foray into the whole process as he enters Year 1 in Gainesville. Except it wasn’t real. Sumrall was just trying to be funny, as he explained in a post on his social media on Wednesday night.
There was backlash, and Sumrall wanted to diffuse the whole situation.
“You are right Tom. I wasn’t serious. I was joking,” wrote Jon Sumrall in his post.
That “Tom” Sumrall was referring to was Tom Crean, the longtime college basketball coach who’s now an ESPN college basketball analyst. Crean wrote a social media post attacking Sumrall’s reaction, so Sumrall wanted to let everyone know, Crean chief among them, that his reaction wasn’t real.
FOX reporter Greg Auman had some explaining to do as well on his social media on Wednesday in the aftermath of the whole thing. He wrote that the phone that caused this whole ordeal was in front of him and left unattended.
So, when the ringtone came, there was nobody right there to immediately shut it off. It played for “five seconds before someone else silenced it, so the interruption was a little longer than most like this,” wrote Auman in his post.
Dan Wolken of Yahoo Sports also posted on his social media that it was an alarm that went off on the phone and not even a phone call, because it happened at the seat next to his at Sumrall’s press conference. Because it was an alarm and not a phone call, it got through the silent mode.
It was an eventful first SEC Media Days for Sumrall, maybe too eventful, but now that it’s over Sumrall can get down to the business of fall camp and getting the Gators back to where they want to be — with no cell phones around anywhere to interrupt anything.
Joking and ringtones aside, there is an SEC championship at stake this fall for Sumrall and his Gators. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about Florida’s chances to contend for that SEC crown amid the usual brutally tough competition inside the conference:
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.
