Jon Sumrall has a reset- not a rebuild- ahead of him with the Florida Gators football program. (Photo credit: Matthew Lewis, WRUF)
At long last, Florida Gators football is upon us.
The countdown to Florida’s kickoff against FAU is now beneath two weeks. The 2026 Florida Gators State of the Program Address- traditionally the demarcation line between offseason hype and starting to collect actual data about an upcoming season with practice reports- is now in the rearview mirror. Ali Peek and Chris Phillips were terrific guests as always, and this year, our discussion about the Florida Gators football program was so lively and detailed that it spanned more than five hours of talking ball.
As such, we broke it down into four shows. If you haven’t already, catch yourself up and watch the State of the Program here.
Part 1: How Did We Get Here? | Part 2: Sumrall’s First Offseason | Part 3: Roster Breakdown | Part 4: 2026 Season Predictions
What those six hours of football discussion didn’t do- they couldn’t- was revisit the depths of the subterranean trench that Billy Napier SlingBladed the Florida Gators football program into. And to the credit of anybody reading that statement and rolling their eyes with something like “not this again, man, move on!” running through their heads- well, we’re about to. But we can’t yet.
Because as Jon Sumrall begins his tenure as the Florida Gators football coach, there’s a potential trap lying somewhere up ahead, way, way out there in the haze between the near and intermediate futures. And that trap is one that we as fans have to avoid.
The extent of Billy Napier’s damage to the Florida Gators football program is important to remember
You see, Billy Napier was the worst coach in the history of Florida Gators football. I don’t care if Josh Cody and Raymond Wolf technically had worse winning percentages in the years during and just after World War II; this does nothing to change that fact. Opinions are opinions, but facts are facts, and here are two of them: Napier had the worst winning percentage of any coach since Wolf 80 years earlier, and Napier had more resources at his disposal than every single Florida coach before him.
Napier lost to South Florida. Not with the excuse of Skylar Morninwheg thrust into the cockpit and 40% of the two-deep out for the rest of what was already a lost season, mind you. The Georgia Southern experience was bad- really bad- but at least you could look back and say, “OK, well, that was a future NFL running back in Jerrick McKinnon knifing through our scout team defense.”
Not the case last September. Napier lost to South Florida with his hand-picked recruits, not the least of which was his prized five-star signee DJ Lagway at QB, in the second game of the season, with expectations as high as they’d ever been under his watch. And he did so with just the latest iteration of bad play-calling and nonsensical clock-management.
Napier’s teams also lost to pre-Diego Pavia Vanderbilt by unsuccessfully trying to catch a punt in its own end zone, nearly blew the Gators’ anti-shutout streak in his first season against Oregon State, single-handedly won Jayden Daniels the Heisman Trophy that his camp is now bitching about with LSU by giving up enough yards to form a new continent (702), surrendered a 4th and 17 in the final minute to lose another winnable game against Missouri…
…wait, wait, I’m not even close to done…
…got blown out of the Swamp by Miami and Texas A&M in back to back (non FCS) games, lost multiple games in the Swamp in every other season as well after Steve Spurrier lost five games in Gainesville in a dozen years, casually bled the clock out of a game it was losing by three scores with just under eight minutes to go, seppuku’ed itself with the worst-designed play I’ve ever seen against FSU in 2023, and got annually fathered by the Kentucky Wildcats during the twilight of Mark Stoops’ career, which was deemed to be so beneath the standards of Kentucky football that Stoops was fired mere weeks after Napier.
And those were the things that went wrong when the Gators actually took the field and lined up for the play within the confines of the rules. There were also a whole bunch of times where even that bar couldn’t be reached. You know, like when Florida trotted out its punt return team with two players wearing the same jersey number to give Utah a lifeline on a dying drive that would end in a touchdown, routinely took the field with as few as eight and as many as thirteen players, couldn’t line up properly for Trey Smack’s game-winning field goal against Arkansas in 2023 to directly cost Florida that game, et al.
And none of those examples I cited even touches on the fact that if I had a nickel for every time a Florida defensive lineman spit in an opposing player’s face to flip momentum in a game Florida would eventually lose on its home field under Billy Napier, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot. But it’s weird that it’s happened twice: Jamari Lyons vs. FSU in 2023 and Brendan Bett vs. USF in 2025.
…this is not the standard for the Florida Gators football program
I don’t run through all of that stuff to give you PTSD. I promise. I’m just saying, remember that this was the extent of the damage our previous head coach did to the Florida Gators football program.
And this is the point. All those things I just ripped through are not the bar for Jon Sumrall to clear. They can’t be.
The Florida Gators football program is a tradition-rich empire that showed flashes of dominance in the 1980’s before co-running the sport in the 1990’s and 2000’s with two or three other teams. The program fell on some hard times shortly thereafter, sure. But those hard times do not define the program, or redefine them for that matter.
Billy Napier was not part of those “hard times.” He wasn’t even part of the “hardest time yet” within any natural order of things. His bloodlust for spam-calling plays like an ADHD-riddled middle schooler who just learned about the Madden video game series hijacked this program and crash-landed it into the ocean, where it proceeded to further spiral out of control until it met the ocean floor- and then kept digging through the sand.
That’s not part of the natural cycle of most programs’ rise-and-fall routines. That’s not even a feature of this program; it’s a malfunction of it. Any coach with such a wild laundry list of spectacular failures at a program like Florida is an obvious anomaly, a low point that cannot possibly be replicated.
Think about it. Ron Zook averaged an 8-4 record here. Will Muschamp had Florida 11-1 and on the doorstep of a BCS Title Game one year. Jim McElwain got us to back-to-back SEC Title Games. And had the 12-team CFP existed during his time here, Dan Mullen would have had Florida in it in each of his first three seasons.
Billy Napier, on the other hand, never did better than 7-5, and in his other three seasons, Florida lost more games than it won. To meet that is nothing to strive for. To be better than that is nothing to celebrate.
Being “better than Billy Napier” is not, and cannot be, the goal at Florida
And that’s the point. Should Jon Sumrall go 7-5, then 8-4, then 8-4 again in his first three seasons, there will be some out there who go, “Well, it’s better than Napier!” Yes. I know that. It’s pretty easy for anybody to be better than Napier. All you have to do is win as many games as you lose- which you could achieve by literally never coaching a game- and you’d be better than Napier.
But “being better than Napier” isn’t the standard here. You or I could call a more effective drive than Napier by randomly picking plays out of a hat. At least then there’d be some element of surprise to things.
So for Jon Sumrall, the goal in his first season isn’t to make the CFP, or beat Georgia, or even win nine games. The goal has to be to reset the expectations. Just yank the plug out from the wall and then put it back in so this machine can recalibrate itself.
He’s certainly made the moves needed to do it, and possibly right away. I’m on record saying I’m a big fan of a lot of the things he’s done, such as hiring Buster Faulkner and Phil Trautwein. And whoever wins the Florida QB battle, there’s enough talent around him in that offense that the ask from him is minimal in order to succeed. Sumrall absolutely has what he needs to win now, which is why few people are calling his job ahead a “rebuild.”
Let’s just all remember, both now and for as long as Sumrall’s time should last, to not compare him to Billy Napier. I know some people out there are going to do that. Mocking Napier in some sense is one thing- he made $20M to get the high hell out of Gainesville, he can deal with mean tweets- but if ever hard times come about for Sumrall, which I’m sure at some point they will, I really do not want to ever see people using “it’s better than Napier” as some kind of coping mechanism.
Instead, let’s say this: “he restored us to the dimension of normalcy, we’re just at the lower end of what could reasonably be expected from a Florida Gators football team right now.”
And here’s hoping that one day very soon, Sumrall will have us enjoying the fruits of the higher end of that dimension.
