For Jon Sumrall to have a successful tenure at Florida, there are only two things he needs to do. That’s it, just two. You may have your list of a dozen or more items, but I have merely a pair of things on mine:
- Beat good teams
- Don’t lose to bad teams
That’s it, thanks for reading, I’ll catch you next time.
Okay, there’s a little more to it than that. To illustrate, I will talk about some of the (unfortunately many) Gator head coaches I’ve seen in my time being a fan.
I’ll actually start with the latter point: don’t lose to bad teams. It’s not as though if you lose to a bad team once then it’s all over for you. Nick Saban famously lost to Louisiana-Monroe in his first year at Alabama. It wasn’t a good ULM team either, as it finished 6-6 that season. But the next-worst team he lost to there was what, probably an eventual 8-4 Texas A&M in 2021? If you’re losing to bad teams more than once, you’re probably not going to last long.
This is one of the most remarkable factors of Urban Meyer’s run in Gainesville. His clear worst loss also came in his first season. Late in the year, his Gators went on the road to face Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina and went home having lost 30-22. I was at that game while a part of the Gator Band, and let me tell you, attending a frustrating loss in Williams-Brice with that $*(^#$^* rooster crowing noise going off every two minutes is not a fun time.
The Head Ball Coach needed a few years to figure out how to win consistently in Columbia, and his ’05 team finished at just 7-5. That fact made that game Meyer’s only loss to a team that finished with fewer than nine wins. Yes, the only one.
Carolina aside, all of his losses in his first two seasons were to teams that finished with at least ten wins. The Ole Miss team that scored the upset that led to Tim Tebow’s famous promise? It went 9-4. Even in 2010 when Meyer was present physically but barely there mentally, the five losses were to an 11-win team, two ten-win teams, and two nine-win teams.
Spurrier himself was good about this at UF, though you have to calibrate things a bit because there was only an 11-game regular season back when he was on the sidelines. The 12th game largely was a chance for teams to get an easy extra win via a cupcake of some flavor, so in most cases you can mentally add one win to records from back then to compare to now. Not always, like when UF spends its 12th game to play Miami, but most of the time for most teams. Side note: Meyer’s first year was long enough ago that it was the last year of the old 11-game schedule, so you can mentally bump up that South Carolina loss to being to an eight-win team if you’d like.
What counts as a “bad loss” was different with UF coming off of probation and having never won a title that wasn’t later stripped, but the closest thing Spurrier had to one for a good long time was at 7-5 Mississippi State in 1992. His next loss to a team that won fewer than nine games, which in a conversion to present-day schedules effectively means a ten-win team, was in Starkville again to an 8-4 Mississippi State team in 2000. Then the Auburn loss in 2001 came to an eventual 7-5 Tiger squad.
So if you give all those old opponents the obligatory extra win that the 12-game schedule would’ve meant, then Spurrier only lost to two teams with fewer than nine (schedule length adjusted) wins. One every six years is not a bad rate. Just ask Meyer. And all three of those losses between them were to decent teams. It’s not like they were dropping contests to actual bad-bad opponents.
Some of the truly bad losses in recent program history still come easily to mind because Florida doesn’t actually have that many of them, despite all the head coach shuffling.
Ron Zook’s tenure-destroying loss to 3-8 Mississippi State and Will Muschamp’s infamous loss to Georgia Southern were the worst losses the program had by a wide margin for the three decades beginning with Spurrier’s return in 1990. The former was the program’s only loss to a team that finished below .500 until Dan Mullen’s last year when he lost to a pair of teams (LSU and Missouri) that went 6-6 and then lost their bowls. Right after, Billy Napier lost to eventual 5-7 Vandy in 2022, 4-8 Arkansas in 2023, and 5-7 Kentucky in 2025.
Now, it’s better than many alternative worlds to say that you only lose to teams with nine or ten wins. But, that’s only half the job. This is where that first point from the beginning comes in. You do actually need to beat good teams with regularity.
Zook was 3-9 against ten-game winners, with the three wins being two against Georgia and then then endlessly hilarious one of beating Saban in his first national title year. Only 2004 needs an schedule-length adjustment since 2002 and 2003 were trial runs of the 12-game schedule, and that gives him an extra win over 9-3 FSU (the Ron Zook Field game) and an extra loss to 9-3 LSU.
Florida was 4-14 against ten-game winners in Muschamp’s time, with three of the wins coming in 2012 and the fourth being when his alma mater tried to save his job in 2014. Jim McElwain started 2-0 with wins over eventual 10-3 teams Ole Miss and Georgia but finished 2-6. Mullen went 2-8, though with normal schedules in 2020 he might’ve gotten to 3-10 (win over 8-2 UGA but losses to 9-1 Texas A&M and 9-2 Oklahoma). Napier was a miserable 3-17, with all three wins being ones you can probably remember (’22 Utah, ’24 Ole Miss, ’25 Texas).
For Sumrall’s tenure and on, we’ll need to remember that his time begins with the year that the nine-game SEC schedule came to pass. Instead of everyone picking up an automatic win most years like the 12-game schedule change provided, it means that it’s going to be harder to get an additional win each season. Sumrall may simply get fewer chances to beat eventual ten-win teams than many of his predecessors, with what FSU does with and after Mike Norvell playing a significant role there too.
First years are seldom completely smooth. The tenure-worst losses for two all-time greats (Saban at Bama, Meyer at UF) came in their first. Spurrier’s 1990 team may have been “1st in the SEC” as stadium signage used to say, but it took a 45-3 loss at Neyland. Meyer also needed overtime to beat a 5-6 Vandy team in ’05. At least one confounding result is probably headed our way this fall.
But knowing that, I want to see at least one result the other way where Florida pulls off a good result against expectations. Here I am thinking of something like Meyer’s 2005 Georgia win where the Gators scored touchdowns on their first two drives and then parked the bus to win 14-10.
It was two weeks after Saban’s LSU defense frustrated Meyer to the point of postgame tears. The Nicktator showed that the haters and doubters were right: porting the Utah spread option largely unchanged to the SEC really wasn’t going to work. Meyer, Mullen, and staff spent the ensuing two weeks, enabled by an open date, to do what overhauls could be done mid-season to bring the fullback and blocking tight ends back. It paid an immediate dividend with a win over a hated rival. It wasn’t a pretty game, but by hook or crook he was going to get that W.
It wasn’t smooth sailing from there. The high of the Cocktail Party victory was followed in sequence by the overtime win over Vandy and that South Carolina loss. Nothing is ever a straight line up in college football, other than I guess Curt Cignetti’s early Indiana tenure.
I won’t be judging Sumrall’s first season solely off of the record. I mean, yes, if the team goes 6-6 this fall, that’ll be a bad sign for him. If that does happen though, then it’ll be a symptom of bad signs that will be evident by means other than looking at the win and loss columns.
He’ll get a mulligan from me somewhere if needed, but I need to see a real quality win or two in there as well. I need to see both things I listed above from him, even now in Year 1, especially now that it’s the portal era when you can overhaul a roster quickly.
Beat at least one good team. Don’t lose to a bad team. If it was just that simple, then everyone would do it. But that’s the job in front of Sumrall this fall.