Summer of Jon Sumrall? The lovefest with Florida’s new coach is fun, but winning matters more
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GAINESVILLE — The Jon Sumrall summer lovefest continued in earnest on Tuesday, as Florida opened its first fall camp under the new head Gator.
In football cities across America, the most popular coach in town is the new one. There’s a lot of juice that comes with simply not being the guy that left in a messy divorce or just got fired. In that respect, Sumrall’s no different than Alex Golesh at Auburn, Will Stein at Kentucky, or Pete Golding at Ole Miss. It can’t get any worse, right?
A fan base full of rural central Florida basement dwelling man caves will happily defend their head coach getting pedicures if it means they finally have a coach capable of consistently winning games.
The Sumrall lovefest is hardly an exclusively Gainesville phenomenon.
The Sumrall love reaches well beyond fans fighting (and winning) battles with ESPN hosts over the merits of pedicures.
The summer of Sumrall has gone national, and the takes flow like victory nectar from the keg of glory.
How do they love him? Let us count the ways.
Greg McElroy, one of the best analysts in the sport, watched Florida this spring and came away opining that “Sumrall wins SEC Coach of the Year in 3 years.”
We aren’t talking about a real game. We’re talking practice and it’s lesser-known downtrodden cousin, a “spring game,” which isn’t a game or a practice so much as it is a publicity and revenue-creating event. But Greg McElroy is convinced, and he’s not the only guy who watched Sumrall coach this spring and caught feelings.
McElroy’s college coach, none other than the GOAT, Nick Saban, has joined the lovefest.
“I think Jon Sumrall is very, very impressive,” Saban said on SEC Network during SEC Media Days last month in Tampa. “That guy has the right stuff. He talks about the right things in terms of intangibles to build a program and a culture that’s going to sustain, and Florida, I think, is a sleeping giant.”
Longtime college football journalists caught the lovebug, too.
Bruce Feldman wrote at The Athletic that Sumrall “is the best thing to happen to Florida football in 20 years.” That’s a heady, eye-opening take from a guy who built a brand on being right.
Josh Pate, an immensely talented voice himself, thinks Sumrall “has the makings of a generational coach.”
In a different age, free from Google and Chat GPT, you might even forget that Sumrall wasn’t the head coach Florida fans wanted in the first place.
The people’s choice was Lane Kiffin, the brash-talking, offensive genius who idolizes Steve Spurrier and navigated the new era of NIL and the portal to turn Ole Miss into a College Football Playoff program.
The “people” deny it now, of course, but plenty of Gators felt Sumrall was a consolation prize, the latest evidence of athletic director Scott Stricklin’s inability to land a big fish to lead Florida’s thoroughbred football program.
The summer of Sumrall has flipped that narrative on its head.
Florida legend and SEC Network analyst Chris Doering was among the loudest to flip Florida missing on Kiffin on its head when he proclaimed the Gators “dodged a bullet” in whiffing on Kiffin, who is now the new head coach at LSU.
The Sumrall vibe shift is either evidence of an unprecedented spin cycle, hopium, or a little bit of both.
The good news?
We are about to find out who is right.
Here’s the reality.
Florida is in the midst of its worst decade of football since integration.
The Gators have suffered 4 losing seasons in the last 5, and the sole winning season resulted in a trip to the Gasparilla Bowl, hardly the stuff of southern football dreams.
While this decade of football has been the nadir, Florida’s mediocrity has been mainstreamed since health concerns and Saban scaries ran Urban Meyer out of town in 2010.
Dating back to Meyer’s departure, Florida has suffered more losing seasons in SEC play (7) than winning seasons (6).
It hasn’t been for lack of trying.
The Gators have hired all manner of personalities to lead the program, from the fiery, meat-headed Will Muschamp to the meditatively calm Billy Napier.
Sumrall is Florida’s fifth (non-interim) head coach since Meyer, and only 1 of the prior 4 could be objectively viewed as successful by Florida’s lofty standards.
That coach, Dan Mullen, went to 3 consecutive New Year’s 6 bowl games before a combination of lagging facility issues, poor staff hires, and a refusal to commit to recruiting until “recruiting season” cost Mullen his job in 2021, his lone poor season in Gainesville.
But even Mullen had only 1 truly great team — the 2019 Gators — who won 11 games and an Orange Bowl and were basically one poor Todd Grantham game plan against Georgia away from being in the College Football Playoff.
Yes, Mullen had a generational offense in 2020, but he squandered it with a bad defense, falling just short against a great Alabama team in the SEC Championship Game.
The 2019 and 2020 seasons were without question the high-water marks for Florida football over the past 10 years, and neither delivered a College Football Playoff appearance, let alone a SEC or national championship.
It’s now been nearly 20 years since Florida last won the SEC, when Tim Tebow, Percy Harvin, Brandon Spikes and Urban Meyer bested Nick Saban’s Alabama in 2008.
Florida’s made 4 SEC Championship Game appearances since, but only the 13-win 2009 Gators and the 2020 Gators were competitive once reaching Atlanta.
In fact, the Gators have never appeared in the College Football Playoff in any form, coming closest in 2012, under Will Muschamp, when Florida finished 11-1 and ranked third in the final BCS standings, just missing the National Championship Game.
Sumrall, in other words, walks into a program that’s been stuck in the swampy muck of mediocrity for a long time.
We’ve seen moribund programs rise from the ashes before, and under the right coach, it can be done quickly. There’s no need for lengthy think pieces about patience and meticulous program-building.
The past hires all had excuses, some reasonable, which combined with their own flaws fomented failure.
Muschamp was a first-time head coach who never got his coordinator hire right, fumbling away blue-chip laden rosters in the immediate years after Meyer left the culture broken but the cupboard full.
Jim McElwain lacked administrative commitment on par with Georgia, LSU, and Alabama, but his offense was vanilla and his strength program was so poor his All-American caliber quarterback talent hit up a private business for supplements, spoiling his one great chance at a championship.
Mullen’s offense was genius and he knew it, but his ego never made room for the possibility he might be wrong about anything else, and Florida’s lagging facilities were a convenient excuse to not recruit harder.
Napier was too loyal to assistants who weren’t SEC-ready and, armed with unprecedented resources and administrative support, simply couldn’t give up the play-calling he was convinced got him the job in the first place. Praised for his demeanor and plan, pride was his downfall.
Sumrall has none of these issues, at least on paper.
He didn’t hire his friends. He loves recruiting. He’s armed with immense resources, a growing NIL war chest, and world-class facilities. Everything is in place.
Florida fans know what getting the hire right looks like.
The triumphs of Spurrier are everywhere on campus. The bulk of the fan base remembers Meyer. Just 500 yards from the football building, Todd Golden leads a basketball staff and culture that is one of the most innovative and successful programs in America.
Sumrall will win, or he won’t.
You don’t coach at Florida to eventually get fired, which is the unspoken baseline reality at some places.
You coach at Florida to be in the pressure cooker and, if you win, to be immortal.
Steve Spurrier’s name graces the field. Urban Meyer will be inducted into the Ring of Honor this autumn.
The pressure is a privilege, punctuated by a date with posterity.
Sumrall seems to get that.
“’I’m not going to whine and complain about being an SEC head football coach,” Sumrall said at SEC Media Days, sounding convincingly unfazed about inheriting a 4-8 football team in a conference that’s ruthlessly unforgiving.
That’s refreshing, but it’s talking season, when plenty of things coaches say sound refreshing.
It’s easy to say the right things and another to figure it out once you lose a game you aren’t supposed to lose. Talk to me when Alex Golesh gets the better of a green Florida offensive line and a new quarterback in September.
Talk to me when a Florida defense that hasn’t ranked in the top 50 this decade, let alone the top 25, can’t get a big stop in a deafening Swamp when Ole Miss visits late next month.
Talk to me when Sumrall is fighting tooth and nail to keep a recruiting class together after the Gators swim through the dark waters of an October and early November stretch that features games at Missouri and Texas, a trip to Atlanta to play archrival Georgia, and a titanic home tilt against College Football Playoff contender Oklahoma.
The summer of Sumrall was fun, but the pressure cooker is coming.
Did Florida hire a generational mind, or at least someone capable of fixing a football program with one of the country’s proudest fan bases?
We don’t know, but we’ll figure it out when talking season ends.
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Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
