If a frog had wings and other if only thoughts

There are skeptics as well there should be. Jon Sumrall has the entire Gator Nation on its feet and paying attention for a news flash that another highly regarded recruit has committed to play for the Gators. When it comes to recruiting these are the most exciting times since Will Muschamp put together back-to-back classes that were ranked No. 3 nationally. Recruiting is the lifeblood of all college football programs and Florida’s recruiting has fallen into an abyss, which has plenty to do with four losing seasons in the last five years.

From 1980-2010, the Gators never had a losing season. Florida won more football games (210) from 1990-2010 than any school in the country. There were eight SEC championships and three national titles. That was then. This is now and now the Gators are that woulda, coulda, shoulda program as in woulda won more games, coulda won more games and shoulda won more games if only.

If only.

I remember like it was yesterday the drive up to Folkston, Georgia early one summer morning in the early 1960s. I was with my insurance agent grandfather whose commercial, home owners and auto insurance business was stretched over a territory that extended from South Georgia to the Polk County line and everything in between. C. Carle Van Sickle used those day trips to talk everything from his love of the Florida Gators to things more serious such as life its own self. On this particular morning he said the two most dangerous words in the English language are “if only.”

If only means you’re living with regrets. If only means you could have done more with what you had to work with. If only means you didn’t work hard enough to erase the doubts by getting the job done. If only means you didn't do your best and instead offered excuses why you screwed up.

C. Carle Van Sickle is the first person from whom I heard the phrase “if a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his butt every time he jumped.” A few years after hearing that for the first time in my grandfather’s car, my biology teacher in McComb, Mississippi used it when a classmate offered up the time honored “the cat peed on my homework” excuse. The phrase has stuck with me for more than 60 years.

Looking back on the last 15 years of Florida football, there have been far too many if only moments. The Gators are on their fifth football coach since Jeremy Foley plucked Muschamp away from Texas, handing him the reins of a monster program even though he had never been a head coach before.

This was the second time Foley defied conventional wisdom by hiring someone who had never been a head coach before. Ron Zook was the first and that lasted all of three years. Zooker’s unenviable task was to keep the Gators winning at the same rate as the 12 previous seasons when Steve Spurrier won 127 games, six SEC titles and the 1996 national championship. We know how that worked out. Zooker won, just didn’t win enough and he was fired. In four seasons Muschamp won, but not enough and he committed the cardinal sin of losing to Georgia Southern in a game where the then D1AA Eagles didn’t throw a pass in the second half.

The Georgia Southern debacle was in 2013, the year Florida’s streak of 33 non-losing seasons came to an end. Injuries didn’t help Muschamp’s cause. He was down to Skyler Mornhinweg at quarterback by season’s end. Of course, you wonder if Tom Brady could have salvaged an offense coordinated by Brent Peas. Peas, if you recall, was the successor to Charlie Weis, who brought with him the horrendous O-line coach Frank Verducci.

In some respects it was déjà vu all over again as the late, great Yogi Berra might have described it. It wasn’t until Zooker was in year three that he promoted Larry Fedora to offensive coordinator and demoted Ed Zaunbrecher, the master of the 2-inch pass. It wasn’t until year four that Muschamp dumped Peas for Kurt Roper. The Florida offense was good in 2004, Zooker’s last year, and in 2014, Muschamp’s, but in both instances it was too late.

Both Zook and Muschamp were lights out recruiters, but recruiting involves more than bringing in high school kids to develop into future starters. It also involves recruiting competent assistant coaches. Zook didn’t want Zaunbrecher. Muschamp didn’t want Weis. Neither was given a choice in the matter.

Lots of if only moments, too many to count, describe both Zook and Muschamp’s years on the job. The biggest if only is what might have happened if Foley had hired an experienced head coach to follow Spurrier and Urban Meyer?  That's something we can only guess.

Since Muschamp, the Gators have run through Jim McElwain, Dan Mullen and Billy Napier. McElwain lied his way out of a job, but it didn’t help that his offenses were anemic and his recruiting left plenty to be desired. Muschamp left him with an NFL defense, but when everybody graduated and defensive coordinator Geoff Collins left for a head coaching job, McElwain couldn’t cope. The man who tried to act like he was the cool kid from high school who never wore socks and drove a Mustang convertible was exposed. He couldn’t give a straight answer to a simple question when he was winning. When things unraveled in 2017 he came up with a whopper of a fib and got fired as a result.

It didn’t help matters that McElwain’s offensive coordinator was Doug Nussmeier all three years and his co-defensive coordinators in 2017 were Randy Shannon and Chris Rumph.

Mullen gave us offense and three straight New Year’s Six Bowl games. He was hired by Scott Stricklin but only after Stricklin was used and abused by Chip Kelly. Kelly parlayed Florida’s contract offer into the UCLA job, which is the one he wanted. Mullen was the emergency choice and it paid off until the lack of recruiting and bad choices for assistant coaches caught up with him. One bad year and he got the boot, leaving behind a ton of if only moments such as if only Mullen had cut defensive coordinator Todd Grantham loose before his sell-by date expired. Grantham has a history of a couple of good years and then everybody figures out his blitz schemes.

Napier came along highly regarded but too arrogant to hand the play calling over to an offensive coordinator. He believed football games can be won with a team of boy scouts. Having a few boy scouts is a necessity, but to win, especially in a league like the Southeastern Conference, it takes a handful of boy scouts and a majority of borderline psychopaths. This is a violent game and it takes people who enjoy the violence to win battles in the trenches. It’s great if your center is a cerebral but extremely capable type like Jake Slaughter, but you better surround him with people who live on the psychopathic edge. And, your defensive line better be manned by mean, nasty people.

That is how you win in the Southeastern Conference. Napier didn’t see things that way and was shown the door with $20 million in buyout money to comfort him. Napier failed for the same reasons Muschamp, McElwain and Mullen failed before him – bad choices. We are known by the choices we make. We make good choices and good things happen. Bad choices and if we are an SEC head football coach we get buyout money but we leave behind a legacy of if only moments.

Now it’s up to Jon Sumrall to learn from the past mistakes of the previous four coaches. So far he says all the right things, does all the right things, and judging by the results on the recruiting trail, he has hired a staff of top notch assistants.

But he still hasn’t coached or won a game at Florida. Because of the issues with the previous four coaches, it is only natural that there are skeptics who point out the past rather than jump on the Sumrall train. We look at the past and see way too many junctures in which a right decision could have changed the direction in which Florida football has been heading since 2011.

If only. That is the story of Florida football since 2011. None of the four coaches prior to Sumrall came to Florida expecting to be sent packing before their contract expired, but all four have had a hand in plunging Florida from the ranks of greatness to a level of mediocrity not seen since the Bob Woodruff years in the 1950s.

Now it is up to Jon Sumrall to rescue the program before it assumes the identity of a catfish and dwells among the bottom feeders of the Southeastern Conference. It is a monumental task but Sumrall has a championship pedigree as a head coach that lends credence to the optimism that is surging through the Gator Nation. He’s been a head coach four years at two different whistlestops and he’s won three conference titles and played for a fourth. He expects to win here, not in four years but immediately and from what we’ve seen so far, there will be no if only excuses along the way.  If Jon Sumrall were a frog, he would find a way to grow wings.