Early success on the recruiting trail for Florida has to show up on the scoreboard

The Cover 3 Podcast summer school series finally got around to the Florida Gators and there is a lot to talk about.

Jon Sumrall's first six-plus months leading the Gators program has to be considered a success. The staff is recruiting at a high level and the roster looks pretty competitive. Bud Elliott and Zach Goodall from 247Sports discussed everything that they expect from the Gators on both sides of the ball, and it's worth the full listen. Goodall said a couple of things early in the conversation that caught my ear. The first thing was about what Sumrall is bringing to the program:

"Selfishly, from a media member's perspective, I'm a huge fan of their transparency and a huge fan of Sumrall willing to come out and be blunt and be honest about what his thoughts are on the state of the roster. He's not over hyping anything."

Jon Sumrall's refreshing style has led to increased optimism

Sumrall has been a darling of the college football media to the point of where the Gators are appearing in a lot of preseason top 25 rankings despite going 4-8 last season and bringing in two inexperienced quarterbacks. Some of that is Sumrall's reputation. He's won a lot of games in just four seasons. In two years at Tulane, he bounced back from a "disappointing" 9-5 season to win 11 games in year two and lead the Green Wave into the CFP 12-team bracket.

But another aspect of that is that we like Sumrall. College football coaches are notoriously deceitful and paranoid. Some are simply outright liars. But Sumrall is refreshingly honest. He's funny. He's self-deprecating. Does he have an ego? Sure. You can have the level of success he's had and get one of the best jobs in college football without having an ego. But he also has a lot of self-awareness.

Sumrall acknowledges the challenges that he'll face in his first season, and he also believes that he is going to get the roster in the right state of mind to meet those challenges. So, yeah, I think some of the preseason optimism about the Gators is very much tied to a coach that has won a lot of games and continues to win the press conferences. 

The days of rebuilding in college football are over for now

Goodall's second point describes Sumrall's sense of urgency:

"He's taken a different approach, in terms of patience versus wanting to win now, compared to Billy Napier. I think a lot of that comes from the success he had at Troy and Tulane. He's not treating this like a multi-year rebuild. I think he will be upset if they don't win 10 games this year.

This is a great point from Goodall, and he dove a little deeper into the way Napier would talk about the process and getting all the pieces to fit and a bunch of other jargon that no one cares about when you're losing. Napier treated the job like he had the time and credibility to make mistakes. He had neither. Sumrall knows what the task is and what the fans want. He wants to win. They want to win and the quicker it happens, the better. 

There's no need to worry about re-building in the current environment of college sports. The annual goal is to put a roster on the field that can win enough games to compete for a spot in the playoffs. Winning the conference is great and the Gators should always be in contention for the SEC. But the true goal is to make the playoffs because that's the only way to win a championship. 

Will the Gators win 10 games in Sumrall's first year? It's going to be very tough because the schedule is brutal, and we won't know what kind of quality depth the roster has until the games are played. But winning at least 10 games is the goal, and it should be the goal every year. 

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