GAINESVILLE
Jon Sumrall’s media availability starts on time.
Such an occurrence is only startling at Florida because the previous man who stood behind that podium had a habit of tardiness. Billy Napier ran two-hour practices that rarely didn’t eclipse a third; he subsequently arrived late for scheduled obligations and, more damning than all, he didn’t win games while at it.
Sumrall is the polar opposite, which was possibly the intention of athletic director Scott Stricklin when making his selection. With spring camp nearly complete, Florida’s new coach is making that exceptionally clear.
“I’m not patient at all,” he said one March morning [sharply at 10:45 because, you know]. “We can’t be complacent, we can’t be lethargic. We have to be urgent, and fiery, and passionate, and we’ve got to compete every day, and we got to strain.”
Claims of that sort can be overwhelming — how can a team become so many foreign things at once? Everything starts in the environment. Florida’s practices nowadays are a sharp one hour and 45 minutes, give or take. The belief is that if a player has the right stuff, they will come in on their own for more training. No need to work them into the sweltering ground. To that point, every practice is in the morning, as opposed to Napier’s 3 p.m. technique.
While the timing changed, most players have testified that the sheer amount of productivity during practices is about the same, despite shorter time on the field. That tracks back to Sumrall’s “urgency” ordeal. Horns and megaphones are the omens of transformation in Sumrall’s eyes, and they’re ever-ringing as the new coach shoots players drills with intentionality. If a coach doesn’t think a player gave their best effort on a rep, the player immediately takes another attempt. Every moment needs to count.
It turns out, the Gators might not be all that opposed to a coach who can explain the logic behind his practices. Rationality had taken a hiatus from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium for some time. Sumrall provides a clear framework for the why — it just couples with a “sky is falling” mentality that now is all that matters.
“Coach Sumrall does a tremendous job of making every coach aware that, hey, it’s important every period,” strength and conditioning coach Rusty Whitt said. “Every rep is important.”
No disconnect here.
Star running back Jadan Baugh: “Coach Sumrall is 24/7 on our heads.”
Edge Jayden Woods: “He’s very, very hands-on.”
Linebacker Myles Graham: “I love the intensity.”
But a world exists where Sumrall could take this a touch too far. Back in the fall, the week of Napier’s ouster, he spoke of practicing Zen. “There’s no growth without struggle. There’s no good days without bad days,” he proclaimed, outlining how he wanted his players and staff to balance intensity with well-being. It didn’t land well with those of North Central Florida, given the Gators were 2-4. He just wasn’t entirely wrong.
The author of the book he was reading at the time, Phil Jackson’s “Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success,” which preaches the Zen principles Napier tried to teach his team, thinks there’s a balance between the two coaches’ practices.
“You want intensity, but intentionality,” Hugh Delehanty said in a phone interview. “Everything can mean something, but some of it needs to be rest and release of stress.”
Every Florida player to have spoken publicly this spring has described Sumrall’s environment as some derivative of “urgent,” “intense” or “competitive.” None of those are band practices, especially when trying to resuscitate one of college football’s sleeping giants. It’s also impossible to truly know what happens behind the curtain of Florida’s day-to-day schedule.
A handful of sports psychologists, reached over the phone or via email, backed Delehanty’s analysis, outlining the ways a program that is too intense can slowly wear a player down to a state where they mentally struggle to perform. What any coach should seek is a middle ground.
Maybe it’s worth a gamble for Florida to lean all the way in, anyway, given it has only lost eight games in two seasons since 1980. And one of them is the product of the team Sumrall’s currently shaking to life, which already only has a week of spring camp left, with its spring game Saturday.
“He’s trying to be urgent,” Whitt said. A word to describe these practices, then, Mr. Whitt?
“Eagerness.”
John Devine has worked with the Miami Herald since 1996. He has worked as a Broward sports editor, Broward news editor, assistant sports editor and deputy sports editor before he became executive sports editor in 2021.