The start of the Jon Sumrall era for me has been a breath of fresh air for a number of reasons.
Not the least for me, somewhat selfishly but somewhat not, is that he isn’t treating media like the enemy. Nick “Rat Poison” Saban and most of his coaching tree treat the media with frostiness at best. Saban at least knew how to turn on the charm for the scribes when he needed to, something many of his less skilled former assistants didn’t when they really needed to.
But I can think specifically back to the first year of Billy Napier where whoever was managing his Twitter account blocked a bunch of people who, I guess, had said something critical about him. That list of blocks included me.
I didn’t really care, then or now. I’ve never had or even sought access in the UAA, and little of value ever came from his account. Someone who covers recruiting, which is not me, would want to follow it to see the sunglasses-wearing smiley face emojis he put out for commitments at the time. Everything else was utterly skippable and/or forgettable.
That said, the blocking spree was a sign of a thin-skinned trait in the building, one that would prove telling. Napier refused to adapt when things didn’t go according to his reputedly detailed plans. He never gave up on hiring buddies, never gave in on updating his offensive scheme, and never tried all that hard to hire an offensive coordinator. Reportedly he tried hiring Charlie Weis, Jr. from Ole Miss prior to 2024 but otherwise didn’t make an effort to get a new play caller. I have no information to prove that Napier’s stubbornness was in part because he didn’t want to admit his critics had a point, but it wouldn’t shock me.
Sumrall has gone on a media blitz the likes of which we have never seen from a fresh UF hire. He has something of an advantage because there’s just so much more media now than there used to be. Ron Zook wouldn’t have gone on a podcast or YouTube show because podcasts and YouTube were years away from being invented. That said, Sumrall has appeared all over the place and done an excellent job of winning over people, fans and media and fan-like media.
He’s let the beat writers stay at spring practices much longer than Napier and some of his predecessors did as well. They still don’t see much of anything that would tip the team’s hand to any degree, but it does give fans and media alike more to talk about this time of year.
Sumrall also feels fresh because he is fresh to the program. Since Urban Meyer left, Florida has otherwise hired three past Saban assistants and a past Meyer assistant. The former three were very different people but still had their synchronized talking tics that come from being in that tree. And even when they were doing their own things, they repeated themselves a ton because part of the Saban training is staying relentlessly on script. And then with Dan Mullen, well, Florida folks were well acquainted with his shtik long before he arrived.
Sumrall never worked for Saban or Meyer. That alone means the rhythms of how he talks and works are quite different, even as he’s cozied up with Meyer since the hire. He’s a different kind of cat, as Meyer himself would say.
It’s also different for me personally because I don’t feel the need to warn anyone about anything regarding Sumrall by now. It could be that I just haven’t followed him closely, but I didn’t follow Napier at Louisiana closely either and still found plenty to be concerned about after some background research on him.
When I say warn, I do mean warn. I wrote something trying to re-set everyone’s expectations about Mullen upon his hire. A lot of folks seemed to think his history of putting up big scores in Gainesville meant he was aggressive, but that wasn’t true. Nine years of working in Starkville showed he was actually pretty conservative in his core, and it bore out at UF. He was fired for a bunch of reasons, but one contributing factor was losing games he shouldn’t have by not being aggressive enough. And also, I warned that Florida wouldn’t win a national title with Todd Grantham as defensive coordinator. That wasn’t exactly the boldest take, but it was dead right.
Then after Napier’s hire, I wrote something politely talking of challenges he’d need to overcome. The first, the fact that UF was his first big-time job, was not Napier specific and applies to Sumrall too. But I also flagged things like Napier’s apparent conservatism and cronyism. On the latter point, I said, “the greats usually spare no sentimentality when peak performance is on the line, and when they do, it backfires the same as it does for anyone else.”
Cronyism backfired for Napier terribly. He set his cause back years with his defensive coordinator hires Patrick Toney and Austin Armstrong. Ron Roberts stabilized things at least, but he’s no one’s definition of an elite coordinator.
Sumrall has brought over people from Tulane and his past, which is utterly reasonable. You can’t expect someone to run an organization as complex as a P4 football team entirely with people he’s never worked with before. Tellingly, however, his two Tulane coordinators came to Gainesville to be position coaches, not coordinators. The two actual coordinator hires came from P4 programs. The DC hire has the greater whiff of favoritism since Sumrall had worked with Brad White at Kentucky, but he’ll be running Sumrall’s defense. If Sumrall is who he’s cracked up to be, then that’ll be fine. Steve Spurrier and Mullen are offensive geniuses, but neither sprouted much of a coaching tree of guys who went on to play-calling success elsewhere.
Sumrall has all the normal prove-it questions for all head coaches in their first power conference jobs. I struggle to find any others, however. His one season with a good quarterback, his first at Tulane with Darian Mensah, saw a big upswing in points. He went out and hired the hottest offensive coordinator name on the market. He retained every critical player from last year’s Florida team. The roster imports deom the portal lack true star power, but winning — if he can do it — will take care of that in the future.
For the first time in over a decade, I’m content to sit back and go for a ride with a new hire. I just don’t see any glaring red flags with him Sumrall I did with past guys. It’s the most trust I’ve had since Jim McElwain’s hire, as he was a national title-winning OC who’d engineered a quick turnaround at Colorado State and had another national title-winning OC on the staff and a rising star DC with the tailwind of Muschamp’s defensive recruiting. It goes to show that I’m not infallible, but if you’ve been reading me any amount of time, you already knew I’m not.
Sumrall could end up face planting for any of the reasons past Florida coaches have or for his own fun new reasons. The future is unwritten. However just about all the signs are pointing to someone who’s going to see success. At last.