Gator Football: Sumrall His Admits His 'Big Mistake'

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I have never — not once — heard a head coach admit on the record that he “didn’t know if I made some good decisions.” 

By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com

“Golly.” That’s the word Jon Sumrall used to describe the “dumbest thing” he’s ever done, and for once in this business of hot-take huckstering, I believe the guy may have undersold it.

Here’s what my man did, in case you were busy raking your yard or arguing about targeting calls: 

The Sunday after Tulane’s regular season ended, Sumrall accepted the Florida job. Four days later he was standing at a podium in Gainesville getting introduced as the 31st head coach in Gator history — while still technically employed by a program in New Orleans that had a conference championship game to win that Friday night. 

Then he juggled Early Signing Day for two rosters at once, coached Tulane into its first-ever College Football Playoff berth, watched the CFP selection show, high-fived his Green Wave kids goodbye, and got right back on a plane to go recruit against the very players he’d just told he couldn’t wait to see again.

Two phones. Two hours of sleep. Two programs’ worth of signing-day chaos. And somewhere in there, a wife texting him about groceries while he’s trying to figure out if the incoming call is a five-star tackle or the Green Wave’s tight ends coach.

Now, I’ve covered a lot of coaches in my time, going back to before Steve Spurrier was slinging visors in disgust. And I have never — not once — heard a head coach admit on the record that he “didn’t know if I made some good decisions.” That’s not false modesty. 

That’s a man telling you, straight up, that he ran his own program-launch through a blender for three weeks because the sport’s calendar is a cruel, broken joke and nobody in Indianapolis bothered to fix it before shipping Sumrall off to be the CEO of two SEC-and-AAC-adjacent football operations simultaneously.

So let’s not mince words: taking on both jobs at once — agreeing to stay loyal to Tulane through a historic CFP run while simultaneously trying to stand up a brand-new Florida operation — sounds, on its face, like the kind of decision that gets you fired from both places. 

You can’t build a championship-caliber roster with your recruiting brain split down the middle like a bad piece of oak firewood. 

Ambition is one thing. Trying to be Nick Saban in two area codes at once is another.

Did he?

No. He didn’t make a mistake — and the record says so louder than his own self-deprecation.

Both Tulane and Florida signed off on the arrangement precisely because it protected everyone’s interests: Tulane’s athletic director publicly credited “trust” and “transparency” for letting Sumrall finish what he started, and the Green Wave rode that stability to their first-ever CFP appearance. 

Meanwhile, Florida got a coach who hit signing day running instead of showing up to an empty cupboard — he and his staff went on to land a top-tier transfer haul (Georgia Tech QB Aaron Philo, receiver Eric Singleton Jr., a wave of offensive line reinforcements) while also talking core pieces like Jadan Baugh, Vernell Brown III, Myles Graham and Dallas Wilson into staying home. 

By spring, Florida had an 11-commitment surge in the 2027 class including a five-star running back, and by July, three of those very retained players are going to be standing next to him at SEC Media Days in Tampa.

That’s not the résumé of a man who blew it. That’s the résumé of a man who nearly blew himself up personally so that neither program paid the price for his ambition. 

The “mistake,” if you want to call it that, was agreeing to the double duty at all — but the alternative was abandoning 18 signees mid-cycle or bailing on a Tulane locker room that trusted him to finish the job he started. Given those two lousy options, running himself into the ground for three weeks was the only decent call available. Those kind of human flaws in Sumrall are what makes him one of us.

Sumrall didn’t make a huge mistake. College football’s coaching carousel calendar did — and he’s just the poor soul who got caught living through it with two phones and no sleep to show for it.