Florida Escaped Auburn, But The Yellow Flags Followed It Home
The Gators won a track meet in shoulder pads — “the NBA in cleats,” if you will.
By Buddy Martin
Before anybody books the parade route down University Avenue, it should be noted that the Florida Gators won a track meet in shoulder pads at Auburn — “the NBA in cleats,” if you will — against an Auburn team for whom Alex Golesh apparently found his offensive game plan in the Vatican’s most guarded drawer.
Because the Tigers were throwing Hail Marys all night, except these were not prayers. They were completed passes, big chunks, bursts of chaos and the sort of explosive plays that make defensive coordinators start looking at real-estate listings in another state.
Florida went into Jordan-Hare Stadium Saturday night and won a football game, 44-39, which is the sort of thing Gator fans have been demanding for so long that somebody ought to send them a commemorative coffee mug.
They also committed 16 penalties, which is the sort of thing that gets you killed in the Southeastern Conference, or at least laughed at by the teams with enough offensive linemen to make it hurt.
So, yes, Florida is 3-0. Yes, Jon Sumrall has his first SEC victory as the Gators’ coach. Yes, Aaron Philo survived his first road start in a place where noise is a regional crop. Yes, Jadan Baugh is running with the authority of a man who has discovered that defenders are merely speed bumps with scholarship offers.
Florida made enough of its own big plays to survive. It ran. It passed. It got sacks from a wounded defensive lineman. It got a quarterback with a cowboy mentality. It got another 100-yard performance from Baugh.
And it got penalized 16 times.
That last detail is not a footnote. It is the giant yellow caution sign flashing over everything else the Gators accomplished at Pat Dye Field.
Sumrall, to his credit, did not come into the postgame room with a smile painted on by the scoreboard. He sounded as though he wanted to take the entire officiating crew, his roster and possibly the goalposts into the locker room for a long talk involving a blackboard, a whistle and some old-fashioned public shame.
Then came the part that mattered.
“The penalties were out of control. I mean 16 penalties; we won’t win another game all year if we do that again, not one more game. I got to get it cleaned up, us as a staff have to get it cleaned up, we got to play with more discipline. I did not agree with all of them, but still I am not going to let our guys off the hook, that’s inexcusable.”
That was not coach-speak. That was a man trying not to bite through a podium.
Florida has now gone from a manageable number of penalties in Week One, to twice as many in Week Two, to a full-scale yellow-flag festival at Auburn. Sumrall said he was “no mathematician,” but even in the SEC, where arithmetic is occasionally treated as an elective at some lesser light schools, he knows the curve is pointed in the wrong direction.
And he knows what is coming.
“If we play like that, we will get just slaughtered,” Sumrall said. “It wouldn’t be close.”
That is about as close as a football coach gets to saying the next upper-tier SEC opponent will turn his team into driveway gravel if Florida keeps behaving as though discipline is a rumor.
The Gators were good enough Saturday to win while repeatedly tripping over their own shoelaces. Against better people, there may not be enough offensive fireworks, fourth-down conversions or heroic runs to compensate for it.
Florida can celebrate this one. It should celebrate this one. Road wins in the SEC are not handed out in gift bags with the visiting team’s sideline towels.
But Florida must also understand what it nearly squandered. The Gators had opportunities to make the game less dramatic, less messy and less dependent on everybody’s blood pressure medication.
Emmanuel Oyebadejo, who did not even know Wednesday whether he would play or travel, said the players understood it.
“We are not going to look back on this and be too high and think that everything is all sweet, because it wasn’t,” Oyebadejo said. “We had opportunities to really throw them out of the water, make the game not close. So we’re going to learn from them, need to learn from that because we got a good opponent coming up next week.”
That is the right answer. Florida did not win because it was neat, controlled and polished. It won because, as Sumrall kept saying, it found a way.
A quarterback with dust on his boots
Philo did not look like a quarterback making his first road start in Jordan-Hare. That does not mean he was perfect. It means he had the most valuable trait a young quarterback can have: He did not appear to be frightened by the moment.
Sumrall described him this way:
“I thought he did really well. He has a little bit of a cowboy mentality. He is tough as nails. He will talk a whole lot just to talk, but he won’t back down from nothing. I can tell watching him, just how he carries himself. I got a lot of confidence in him; our team has a lot of confidence in him just because that is the way he is wired. He is a tough, blue-collar, chip-on-your-shoulder type of guy.”
That is a fairly good scouting report for a quarterback, although “he will talk a whole lot just to talk” may eventually become something for the sports information department to embroider on a pillow.
Philo was calmer about it all.
“We talked about it all week,” he said. “All we need is us. We just need the people in that locker room, and that’s who came with us today and we got the job done.”
He said the coaching staff has been transparent, asking him what he likes and does not like, and that three years in the system finally paid off.
“I’ve been in the offense for three years now and I feel like I’ve been preparing for this moment for a long time and all those banked reps just came to fruition tonight,” Philo said.
The kid also saw the obvious: Florida’s offense can be much better when it stops helping the other team.
“I knew that we were extremely explosive offensively,” Philo said. “We stopped ourselves a lot tonight. When we go back and clean it up, I think we can be even better.”
That sentence could be engraved above the Florida football complex this week.
Baugh belongs in the conversation
Baugh ran for another 100 yards, giving him four consecutive 100-yard rushing games. He is the first Florida running back to do that since Fred Taylor, which is a sentence that should cause the older Gator fans to stop, smile and begin describing Taylor runs from the mid-1990s to anyone within hearing range.
Baugh’s touchdown on fourth-and-one had the proper simplicity of a good running play.
“I saw daylight,” he said. “I feel like my offensive line came to play. They had the mentality that we were going to try and seal the game and that is what they needed me to do.”
He also fumbled early and said Sumrall helped pull him out of his own head.
“I just appreciate Coach Sumrall because I was really in my own head there,” Baugh said. “I know that the turnover is not me and I owed it to my team to play a lot better. Coach Sumrall came to me and said that we were going to make more plays. I understood that and we ended up doing so.”
Baugh’s response to the Fred Taylor comparison had the appropriate mixture of humility and ambition.
“Honestly, I have to give him a call,” Baugh said. “Uncle Fred, he’s one of the greats. Everybody knows that. Being able to put my name up there with him and other guys, it is such an honor. Those guys have paved the way for me.”
The Gators’ young runner also made clear that he has no illusions about the 44 points.
“It’s just another day in the office,” Baugh said. “We have a lot more to work on. That’s how I feel. We had a lot of little penalties that we should not have. I think we put ourselves in a deeper hole than we should have been in. The game should have gone a lot better on our end. We got the job done, though.”
And he gave offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner credit for Florida’s suddenly explosive rushing attack.
“Honestly, it is all up to Coach Buster Faulkner,” Baugh said. “When he first came in, he said that we needed way more runs over 20 yards, and he tells me that all the time. So, the way that I practice is because of him. It just gives me more confidence each and every day.”
As for another Heisman pose, Baugh is not apologizing.
“Each and every day I feel like I put in so much work,” he said. “Me and my team, especially the offensive line. If I am doing what I am doing, that means those guys up front are doing what they need to do. What I do is all up to those guys. I started doing the pose in the first game. It’s really the defenses’ fault. Last week, when I did not do the pose, they were upset. But it is a statement.”
There are worse statements a Florida running back can make than, “Stop me if you can.”
Alabama roots and Auburn heat
For Sumrall, the win came in a place tangled up in his Alabama upbringing and football memories. He was born in Texas but raised in Alabama, and he spoke with genuine sentiment about the old coaching names that still hang over football in that state like church steeples.
“But man, I grew up in this state,” Sumrall said. “You know as a kid there were a couple of people I always watched and one of their names is on the field, Pat Dye. I got a ton of respect for Pat Dye; God rest his soul.”
Then came the Alabama coaching royalty.
“Then the other two across the state, Gene Stallings and Bear Bryant, like I watched those guys my whole life and Bear Bryant died basically when I was born, but I’ve idolized the great coaches who have coached in this state,” he said.
For Sumrall, winning his first SEC game on Pat Dye Field had personal weight.
“For our first SEC win and as a program, and me as a head coach to do it on Pat Dye Field, I can’t tell you what that means to me personally because I have a picture of Pat Dye and Bear Bryant in my office, in Moundville, Alabama hunting rabbits,” Sumrall said. “To do it on Pat Dye Field means something to me.”
That is a good football story. Two Alabama legends hunting rabbits in Moundville, preserved in a photograph on the wall of a coach who just won an SEC game at Auburn. The sport still has room for a little mythmaking, particularly when it is not being interrupted by another flag.
But Sumrall had one other point to settle. Somebody suggested he had once interviewed for the Auburn job and turned it down.
“Who told you that?” Sumrall snapped.
Then he clarified, with all the delicate diplomacy of a third-and-short play call.
“I didn’t want them, and they didn’t want me!”
That should be enough to end the discussion, though this is college football, where nothing ever dies if there is a message board, an old booster and a grainy photograph involved.
Florida will take the win. It should. The Gators proved they can survive a road shootout, get a tough performance from Philo, lean on Baugh, make adjustments and get crucial defensive plays from a man who had barely practiced.
But they also left Auburn carrying 16 yellow reminders that winning ugly is still winning — until you meet somebody better, deeper and less interested in letting you off the hook.
As Sumrall put it, “They found a way.”
Now Florida has to find some discipline before the next SEC opponent finds 16 ways to beat it. Or it suffocates to death the next time the sky rains with yellow flags.
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