It’s taken me until now to write something about Jon Sumrall’s hiring, and not just his really nice first week, because of a lot of busyness from work and family reasons. It’s been bugging me to not have gotten my thoughts down, but I don’t hate it because it’s given me more time to develop something beyond a gut reaction.
After all, I never seriously considered Sumrall as a candidate for the job until those last couple of days when all the reporting shifted to saying that Lane Kiffin’s lost and UF is pivoting to Sumrall. Reporters and media folks I trust had been saying for more than a year that he was going to get an SEC job sooner than later, so it didn’t shock me at all that Florida vetted him, but it was always with the notion that he was a natural fit for a place like Auburn. Auburn and Florida are pretty different.
It only added to my skepticism about him being a Florida option about a month ago when there was that midweek tempest in a teapot about Florida interviewing Sumrall, followed by Sumrall making public comments about how he wasn’t going to do that interview. At the time I interpreted that as UF staging something of a controlled stunt to put pressure on Kiffin to stop playing games with LSU and figured that Sumrall wouldn’t appreciate being used like that.
Well, turns out Sumrall didn’t have any hard feelings at all. In all his interviews since taking the job, he looks like there is a barely contained giddy feeling about being the Florida head coach. Say what you want about the program’s struggles of late, but clearly the gig has a mystique in the coaching world that persists.
I still feel the need to be guarded because how just how many different kinds of coaches have tried and failed in the last 15 years, but I am more optimistic about Sumrall in his honeymoon period than anyone else that’s held the job since Urban Meyer.
I thought Will Muschamp was a good hire, a hot coordinator in his day who had a reputation at Texas of being a “spread buster” in the wide open Big 12. It was a time when the whole sport was moving to spread systems, and so having a guy who was good at stopping them was a plus. Unfortunately from his opening press conference, he made it clear he wanted what was then called a pro-style offense. It meant Florida would be going backwards on offense. No one was better positioned than Muschamp to separate the wheat from the chaff in the world of spread offense concepts, since he was so effective at stymieing the bad ones, but he had no interest in doing that work and just wanted an offense that wouldn’t put his beloved defense in a bad spot.
Jim McElwain wasn’t an impressive hire, but that cycle was particularly bad for hiring head coaches. Jim Harbaugh at Michigan aside, which even he didn’t break through initially and got dicey for a time at the beginning of this decade, was the only P5 hire that worked out. I did like his coordinator hires; Geoff Collins was an up-and-comer with a reputation for having a great eye for talent, and Doug Nussmeier made two former title-winning Alabama offensive coordinators. There still was the problem of stubbornly running an older pro-style offense in a time when spread schemes were shredding defenses everywhere, and I never liked that.
I was writing for Gator Country by the time Dan Mullen came around, and I wrote two articles before the calendar even hit 2018 with skepticism about his prospects. One was about my problems with his game management, as he was actually more conservative than anyone thought at the time, and another was about how he shouldn’t have brought Todd Grantham with him. I wanted Mullen to work but never thought he was good enough to win titles, and he proved me right.
And then in January of 2022, I wrote something about all the areas where Billy Napier had something to prove. Those areas were whether he was up to the size of the job, conservatism, cronyism, and roster management. I’d judge him 1-for-4 on those, since the roster was in much better shape this year compared to what Mullen left behind. But he was not up to the job, was too conservative, and hired too many buddies instead of top coaching talent. The things that dug his coaching grave were foreseeable from the start.
So far, Sumrall isn’t falling into any of these traps. He’s said he won the way he did at Troy and Tulane because that’s how you have to win in this day and age at Troy and Tulane, but he wants to be a Bob Stoops-like defensive head coach with an explosive offense. Those are just words, but he backed it up by going and hiring Buster Faulkner. Faulkner has done a run-heavy offense at Georgia Tech because he works for a former offensive line coach and that’s what works best with Haynes King and Georgia Tech-level skill talent. However, he also played and has run Air Raid before, so he’s not wedded to power rushing the quarterback 20 times a game.
Sumrall is bringing some guys from Tulane, but he’s had big hires like Faulkner, former Kentucky defensive coordinator in Brad White, and most recently Gator alum and truly elite offensive line coach Phil Trautwein. White is the weakest of those hires, but he’ll be executing Sumrall’s excellent defensive schemes so it’s less important to have a guy who’s a singular defensive mind there. White has been in the SEC for a while and has plenty of experience running someone else’s defense, so it’s got potential.
Sumrall also has emphasized how much he wants to win. His “I’m a winner, I win” comments from his intro presser stand out, but so too does the way he talked about winning with different styles at Troy versus Florida. Winning is his north star.
Muschamp wanted to snuff out offenses most. Mullen wanted to draw up ball plays to attack defenses most. Napier wanted most to call plays because it’s the closest thing to playing quarterback he could experience anymore. McElwain… I’m not actually sure what made McElwain tick to be honest. But for what I could see, winning games wasn’t any of their top priorities. Football is an expansive sport with so many aspects that it’s easy to get lost in some corner or another, and I think a lot of these guys did get lost. Spurrier and Meyer never got lost in that way, with winning always being their top goal. We’ll see about Sumrall, but he’s talking a good game.
Ultimately we won’t know about what the Sumrall Florida experience will really be like until next fall, but I am more cautiously optimistic with him than I’ve been with any hire since Meyer. There will be some important check-ins like the transfer portal window next month and spring practice, so it’s not like we’re in the dark for nine months. But Steve Spurrier Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium is the place where we’ll actually see if his actions back up his words.
For now, though, I’m liking all his words and most of his actions. It’s been some time since I could say that about a new Florida hire.