Earning Access To Gator Scrimmages: It Can Feel Like Cobra and the Mongoose

Not Saturday, but Philo later in the week. (Chris Spears Photo)

It reads more like a coach trying to find a smarter way to manage information flow around a genuinely undecided quarterback race, and getting a little tangled up in the execution.

By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com

Jon Sumrall had what he thought was a good idea, and in fairness, it mostly was.

He let a handful of the regular beat writers into the first fall-camp scrimmage at The Swamp last Saturday — the real one, not the abbreviated look reporters usually get — on one condition: Don’t write it, don’t talk about it, just watch, and save your questions for Monday’s press conference. 

The idea, as best I can tell, was to let the people who cover this team see enough with their own eyes that they could ask sharper, better-informed questions once he was ready to talk — particularly with a quarterback competition between Tramell Jones Jr. and Aaron Philo that everybody in the state has an opinion about.

It backfired a little. Not in any way that’s going to make Sumrall lose sleep, but in the way these things always backfire: Word got out that reporters were in the building and weren’t saying anything, and the fan base — starved for scrimmage details the way Florida fans are starved for most things football right now — filled the silence with jokes and conspiracy theories instead of facts. “Why so serious?” was about the nicest version of it. That’s what happens when you create a vacuum. Somebody fills it, and it’s rarely with the truth.

I don’t think this rises to the level of a controversy. It’s certainly not a flap, and it’s entirely Sumrall’s prerogative to run his program and his practices however he sees fit. So far, he’s pitched a pretty close to perfect game with the media in this town — accessible, direct, willing to answer hard questions about a quarterback battle most coaches would rather duck. This was a well-intentioned idea from a coach who has otherwise earned the benefit of the doubt. It just didn’t work quite the way he hoped.

Here’s the underlying problem, and it’s not new, and it’s not going away: coaches and journalists are frequently at cross purposes. It’s not the cobra and the mongoose — nobody’s trying to eat anybody — but it’s a rivalry with some age on it. Journalists want to get information to the public. That’s the job. Coaches, more often than not, want information to go out in a way that serves their message, their program, their locker room. Sometimes what a coach wants most is for the media to just go dark for a while. That’s understandable from where he’s sitting. It’s just not the job of the journalist to grant that wish.

I’ll say this for Sumrall: He’s been about as transparent as a coach can be on just about everything else. This wasn’t a case of a coach trying to hide bad news. It read more like a coach trying to find a smarter way to manage information flow around a genuinely undecided quarterback race, and getting a little tangled up in the execution.

When Gainesville had more press than Knoxville had assistant coaches

Florida football was already a big deal around these parts — bigger than most people realize until they see another program’s press box for comparison. 

I remember when Doug Dickey first got to Gainesville and was taken aback by how many writers showed up to cover practice. Everything the team did, somebody from the press was there to see it.

Dickey used to tell some of us about his old job at Tennessee: “When I was in Knoxville, we only had one person covering practices — Marvin West. And if we had to kick four guys off the team, all I had to do was tell Marvin, ‘please hold that for a few days.’ And he would.”

That’s never been how it works at Florida. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. 

The Gator media contingent dwarfs practically every other program in this part of the country, and that scale changes the math on every access decision a coach makes. 

What works with one guy in Knoxville doesn’t work with a press box full of writers, radio hosts, podcasters and beat reporters in Gainesville, all of whom have a job to do and an audience waiting on them.

I don’t want to make this bigger than it is, and I genuinely hope it just fades away. There are good people on both sides of this trying to do the right thing — a coach trying to manage a complicated situation fairly, and reporters trying to do their jobs fairly. 

My guess is it works itself out without anybody having to dig in.

Truth is, I hadn’t expected practices to stay open to the media much anymore anyway. Access has been shrinking everywhere in college football for years, and Florida’s no exception. So I’m grateful for what access we’ve had, glad Sumrall’s instinct was to include the media rather than shut it out entirely, and content to let him work out the mechanics of it as fall camp rolls on. That’s his call to make. It’s ours to keep asking good questions when he does.