Did We Fall In Love With The New Gator Football Coach On The First Date?

The Summer of Sumrall

Believe it or not, it  has now been nearly 20 years since Florida last won the SEC. Tim Tebow, Percy Harvin, Brandon Spikes and Urban Meyer beat Nick Saban’s Alabama in 2008, and the Gators have not hoisted the league trophy since.

Florida has made four SEC Championship Game appearances since then, but only the 13-1 Gators in 2009 and Mullen’s 2020 team were competitive in Atlanta.

In fact, Florida has never appeared in the College Football Playoff. Its closest pre-playoff-era miss came in 2012, when Muschamp’s Gators finished 11-1 and third in the final BCS standings, narrowly missing the national championship game.

Is this about to change?

The narrative has been flipped on its head.

Florida legend and SEC Network analyst Chris Doering was among the loudest voices reframing Florida’s failure to land Lane Kiffin, proclaiming the Gators had “dodged a bullet” by missing on Kiffin, now LSU’s head coach.

The Sumrall vibe shift is either evidence of an unprecedented spin cycle, hopium, or a little 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 endured four losing seasons in five years. Its only winning season in that span ended with a trip to the Gasparilla Bowl — not exactly the stuff of Southern football dreams.

This decade may be the nadir, but Florida’s mediocrity has been mainstreamed since health concerns drove Urban Meyer from Gainesville after 2010. Dating to Meyer’s departure, the Gators have had more losing seasons in SEC play than winning ones.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying.

Florida has hired every kind of personality to lead the program, from fiery, meat-headed Will Muschamp to meditatively calm, but ineffectual Billy Napier. Sumrall is Florida’s fifth non-interim head coach since Meyer, and only one of the prior four can be objectively described as successful by Florida’s standards.

That coach was Dan Mullen.

Mullen took Florida to three consecutive New Year’s Six bowls, including an 11-2 Orange Bowl-winning season in 2019 and an SEC Championship Game appearance in 2020. He finished 34-15 at Florida, though his SEC record was a more mixed 21-14.

A combination of lagging facilities, poor staff decisions and Mullen’s refusal to treat recruiting as a year-round responsibility eventually cost him his job. His lone truly poor season in Gainesville — 2021 — ended in dismissal.

Even Mullen, though, had only one impressive Florida team: The 2019 Gators. They won 11 games, captured the Orange Bowl and were essentially one dreadful Todd Grantham defensive plan against Georgia away from a legitimate College Football Playoff push.

Yes, Mullen’s 2020 offense was generational. Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney made Florida appointment television. But the Gators paired that offense with a bad defense, lost a classic to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game and finished 8-4 after the Cotton Bowl loss to Oklahoma.

The 2019 and 2020 seasons remain the high-water marks of Florida football over the past decade. Neither produced playoff berth, let alone an SEC or national championship.

Sumrall inherits a program that has been stuck in the swampy muck of mediocrity for a long time.

We have watched moribund programs rise from the ashes before. Under the right coach, it can happen quickly. There is no need for another lengthy think piece about patience and meticulous program building.

The previous Florida coaches all had explanations — some reasonable — that combined with their own flaws to create failure.

• Muschamp was a first-time head coach who never solved his coordinator problem, squandering blue-chip rosters left behind after Meyer damaged the culture but did not empty the cupboard.

• Jim McElwain operated without the administrative commitment enjoyed by Georgia, LSU and Alabama, but his offense was vanilla and his strength program was deficient enough that quarterback talent sought supplementation outside the program.

• Mullen was an offensive genius and knew it, but his ego rarely allowed room for the possibility that he was wrong about anything else. Florida’s facility gap became a convenient excuse for not recruiting harder. Plus there was the Darth Vader mask.

• Napier was too loyal to assistants who were not SEC-ready. Armed with unprecedented support, resources and facilities, he could not surrender the play-calling duties he believed had earned him the job.

Sumrall, at least on paper, has none of those problems.

He did not simply hire his friends. He loves recruiting. He has 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 culture that is among the sport’s most innovative and successful.

Sumrall will win, or he won’t.

You do not coach at Florida to eventually get fired, which is the unspoken baseline at some places. You coach at Florida to embrace the pressure cooker — and, if you win, to become immortal.

Steve Spurrier’s name is on the field. Urban Meyer is set for the Ring of Honor this fall.

The pressure is a privilege, punctuated by a date with posterity.

Sumrall seems to understand that. At SEC Media Days, he emphasized gratitude for the opportunity and the privileges of leading Florida, rather than treating the job’s demands as a burden.

That is refreshing. But this is still the afterglow of talking season, when plenty of things coaches say sound refreshing.

It is easy to say the right things. It is another thing entirely to figure it out after losing a game you were supposed to win.

Talk to me if Alex Golesh gets the better of a green Florida offensive line and a new quarterback in September.

Talk to me if a Florida defense that has not ranked among the nation’s elite this decade cannot get a stop in a deafening Swamp against Ole Miss.

Talk to me if Sumrall is fighting to hold together a recruiting class after the Gators navigate an October and early-November gauntlet featuring road games at Missouri and Texas, the annual game vs. Georgia this year moved to Atlanta,  and a massive home clash with Oklahoma.

The summer of Sumrall was fun.

But the pressure cooker is coming.

Did Florida hire a generational mind — or at least a coach capable of repairing a program with one of college football’s proudest fan bases?

We do not know.

But when talking season ends, we will find out.