The Med School Dropout Who Made Auburn Bleed Orange and Blue
Oyebadejo, Old No. 99, rumbled through Jordan-Hare like a freight train Saturday night and left Auburn aghast, mumbling
“Did anybody get the number of that truck?”
Oyebadejo led the fight -- then he led the fight song. (UAA Photo)
By Buddy Martin
Somewhere in a lecture hall back in Exeter, England, there’s a professor who probably still wonders what happened to that tall kid who used to show up for anatomy class.
Turns out he went and became one of the best players on the field in the loudest building in the state of Alabama.
Emmanuel Oyebadejo didn’t grow up dreaming of sacking SEC quarterbacks. He grew up watching Manchester United, dribbling a basketball, and — get this — training to be a doctor at the University of Exeter. He’d never touched a football until a coach spotted a 19-year-old giant loitering on the sideline of a club practice and figured, why not. “So, that next Wednesday I was there and playing,” Oyebadejo said.
“Initially, I was just looking for something to keep myself active and busy in my spare time when I wasn’t studying for tests and exams. But then over time, I grew to fall in love with the sport.”
Three years later, that same kid is walking off Pat Dye Field having just put Byrum Brown on his back three different times, and Jon Sumrall’s locker room is singing the fight song because of him.
You can’t make this stuff up. Which is good, because nobody had to.
From Study Hall to the Swamp
Oyebadejo’s tape got him to Jacksonville State in 2024, where he promptly blew out something in fall camp and missed the entire season without playing a down. Most guys would’ve packed it in. Instead, he came back in 2025 and started all 14 games, piling up 41 tackles, 6.5 tackles for loss, 4.5 sacks and two forced fumbles for a 9-5 Gamecocks team that won a bowl game — First Team All-Conference USA, thank you very much. Georgia called. Texas A&M called. Florida called too, and Gerald Chatman did something the other schools apparently didn’t bother to do — he got Oyebadejo’s family on Zoom and made them part of the decision. That’s how you land a 6-foot-6, 299-pound Englishman with the frame of an NFL first-rounder and the résumé of a rookie.
On Oyebadejo's rapid rise from a non-football background to producing sacks, Sumrall said, “I don’t know that I can say I’ve been around someone with that big a leap. It’s just as impressive as his newness to the game. He was a true game-time decision last week too — after watching him move Friday, I felt a little better about him.
So there he was Saturday night, a game-time decision with a bad ankle, stepping into Jordan-Hare Stadium for the first time in his life — 88,000 seats, a road environment that’s swallowed better teams than this Florida bunch whole. And he treated it like a Tuesday practice.
Oyebadejo teamed with Jayden Woods to sack Brown on the game’s opening possession, then got one of his own on the very next snap to force a field goal. He batted down a pass at the line in the second quarter. And when it mattered most — fourth-and-10, Auburn still had a pulse in the fourth quarter — he came off the edge untouched and put Brown on the ground to end the drive, effectively ending the game.
Final stat line: 2.5 sacks, four tackles, a pass deflection, a team-high 84.5 PFF grade on 37 snaps.
Florida finished with seven sacks as a team. He was in on three of them.
Three hundred and eighty-eight days earlier, this man had never taken a college snap. Welcome to the SEC, indeed.
Singing in the Storm
Florida beat Auburn 44-39, its first win at Jordan-Hare since 1999, its first road win in the SEC since 2024, its first SEC victory under Sumrall — pick your streak-snapper, there were plenty. And when the noise finally died down in that visiting locker room, it was Oyebadejo — the medical-school-dropout-turned-terror — leading the fight song, with Sumrall delivering a fiery address laced with a major expletive to a team that had just delivered him a signature win on the field named for Pat Dye.
There’s a symmetry to it that’s almost too clean for a football writer to resist. Sumrall’s wife Ginny is an Auburn grad. Auburn nearly hired him before Florida did. His office back home has a photograph of Pat Dye and Bear Bryant hunting rabbits in Moundville, and here he was getting his first SEC win as a head coach standing on Dye’s actual turf.
“I can’t tell you what that means to me personally,” Sumrall said afterward.
Then, right on schedule, he pivoted to the coach’s version of a cold shower — 16 penalties for 138 yards, and a warning that Florida “won’t win another game all year” if that mess repeats itself. That’s Sumrall in full — sentimental about Pat Dye Field one minute, chewing out his own discipline the next. Ask any Gator right now which mode fires them up more, and I’d bet on the singing.
Because outside the cameras, in the hallways of Jordan-Hare where the real stuff happens, Scott Stricklin was working the room in Orange and Blue, giving out hugs and fist bumps to anyone who’d take one, and stopping outside the locker room to catch the last gasp of LSU’s loss at Ole Miss on a hallway TV — the same LSU that had lured away Lane Kiffin before Stricklin ever got a shot at Sumrall.
You didn’t need a psychology degree to read that scene.
A kid who once studied for exams instead of quarterbacks just became the loudest voice in a Florida locker room that hasn’t had much to sing about on the road in years. If that doesn’t tell you where this Sumrall era is headed, keep watching. The moments, as always, tell you more than the scoreboard ever will.
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