Has Florida’s Historic Quarterback Grove Gone Barren? Where's The Next Great One?

Why the drought? It's time to pick another star QB off the tree.

Gator Nation didn’t put three statues outside that stadium and put a man’s name on the field because a quarterback was merely adequate. 

There used to be a joke around Gainesville that Florida grew quarterbacks on trees — you just walked out back of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium and picked another one. Or shake a limb and sometimes a Heisman winner would fall out. Steve Spurrier in ‘66. Danny Wuerffel in ‘96. Tim Tebow in ‘07. 

Three of them, bronzed in bigger-than-life statues that greet you on the walk into The Swamp, which itself now carries Spurrier’s name on the actual playing surface — Steve Spurrier-Florida Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, if you want the whole mouthful. 

You don’t put a man’s name on a football field unless he did something at that most glamorous of positions that nobody else in the state ever did.

That tree is not bearing fruit anymore. 

Somewhere between Tebow packing his bags for the 2010 draft and now, the Gators misplaced the seed packet, and they’ve been scratching around the QB patch for a decade and a half looking for the next name to go on a wall. Nine different starters in the first seven years after Tebow alone was already an embarrassment, and the position has kept churning ever since — Kyle Trask had his moment, Anthony Richardson had his arm, DJ Lagway had the five-star hype — but nobody has planted roots. 

Turns out, for as celebrated as Florida quarterbacks have been in Gainesville, the sad and true history is that not one has had much of a career in the NFL either, Rex Grossman’s brief Bears run included. Needles in a haystack is right. Or maybe just a tree that quit producing.

Enter Sumrall, Riding Into The Unknown

So here we are again, and in a few days Jon Sumrall saddles up for his first fall camp as a Gator, report day Aug. 4 with practice starting Aug. 5, two scrimmages on tap for the 15th and 22nd, and the whole operation pointed at a Sept. 5 opener against Florida Atlantic. And he’s doing it without a starting quarterback, still choosing between Aaron Philo and Tramell Jones Jr. — or, as he keeps reminding everybody, maybe not choosing at all just yet.

Remember, this isn’t some scheme cooked up overnight. The guy who was supposed to be the answer, DJ Lagway, was one of the shiniest apples to ever fall from that tree — the nation’s No. 1 quarterback recruit in the 2024 class, a kid who went 6-1 as a true freshman filling in for an injured Graham Mertz. Then the injuries piled up — a shoulder that needed surgery, a sports hernia, a calf strain, a hamstring — and a sophomore season that produced 2,264 yards, 16 touchdowns and an SEC-worst 14 interceptions while Billy Napier’s seat got hot enough to get him fired in-season.

By mid-December, Lagway was gone to Baylor, his dad’s alma mater, closing the book on the latest “next great one” without so much as a bowl trip to show for it.

That’s the bare tree Sumrall inherited. What’s left in the room is Philo, a promising but unproven Georgia Tech transfer who’s started exactly nowhere in the SEC, and Jones, a redshirt freshman who mostly watched from the sideline behind Lagway last year. Neither one has thrown a meaningful pass in The Swamp with the season on the line. And Sumrall, in his first go as a Power Four head coach, isn’t blinking.

“I don’t decide who starts, believe it or not,” Sumrall said back in the spring. “They do by how they practice.” By July, at SEC Media Days, he still hadn’t budged: “I view us as having two starters today… My timeline might be five minutes before a game before anybody finds out.” 

And he was refreshingly blunt about what he does and doesn’t have: “Do we have a Heisman Trophy candidate? No, but they both have enough arm talent. They both are adequate runners… So there’s enough there for us to win with.”

Translation: Nobody’s riding in on a white horse. Sumrall’s just trying to make sure whoever gets the reins doesn’t run the wagon into a ditch. 

The View From Press Row

Not everybody frames it the same way I do, and fair enough — this is a debate worth having from more than one angle. One national college football writer put it this way recently, and it’s worth sitting with:

“Now, Jon Sumrall and his assistants may not be quite right in their judgment. This is Sumrall’s first go-round as a P4 head coach, and despite having been on P4 staffs with a pair of coordinators who just came from P4 staffs, they may not have it quite right. It could go either way, with them too optimistic about the starters, too pessimistic about the backups, or some combination of those between position groupings. Preseason workouts will give them some more evidence to base their decisions on, and we’ll all find out how right they are on Saturdays soon enough.

But for the moment, let’s take as given that the coaches are right in how they assess the roster. If they are correct, then Florida has a rare luxury for the current NIL/portal.“

That’s a fairer-minded take than the one rattling around Gator Nation’s group chats, which mostly amounts to “just name somebody already.” It’s also a useful reminder that Sumrall arrived with real staff pedigree — he’s built rosters before, and both of his coordinators walked in from other Power Four jobs — even if none of the three has ever run this particular circus before.

Here’s where I part ways just a little with my colleague’s more charitable reading. It’s true that “good enough not to lose you games” is a luxury Florida hasn’t had reliably since Trask was checking down to tight ends and Tebow was bulldozing linebackers. Take that as a given, sure. But Gator Nation didn’t put three statues outside that stadium and put a man’s name on the field because a quarterback was merely adequate. They did it because, every so often, this program used to grow the kind of arm that changed the sport in this state — and the ache in the fan base isn’t really about whether Philo or Jones can avoid a backbreaking pick in Baton Rouge in October. It’s about whether either of them is a sapling from that old tree, or just this decade’s version of the needle in the haystack that never quite turns gold.

Sumrall’s not wrong to take his time. Naming a starter in August because the calendar demands it, then benching him in September, is exactly the kind of chaos that turned the last decade-and-a-half into a quarterback carousel nobody wanted a ticket for. 

Let the pads pop in Gainesville, let the scrimmages sort out who flinches and who doesn’t, and let him make the call five minutes before kickoff if that’s what it takes.

Just don’t tell me there’s no urgency about which name eventually gets etched next to Spurrier’s, Wuerffel’s and Tebow’s on that walk outside the Swamp. Sumrall’s trusty steed better find that quarterback tree — and soon — because Gator Nation has been standing under a bare one for a long, long time.

And the heat from the sun makes it hotter in The Swamp than anyplace else.