Florida fans will appreciate Jon Sumrall’s obsession with unusual game situations

ator fans don’t need a reminder of what a disaster special teams were during the Billy Napier era. Florida was plagued with mistakes that would be unacceptable for a high school JV squad, let alone an SEC team.

There is hope that the unit will look far more organized under Jon Sumrall, and he highlighted one of the new rules he hopes to simulate during Florida’s “mock game” this upcoming weekend.

Florida to host a “mock game” this weekend

Sumrall was asked on Monday what the difference would be between the two scrimmages he has held would be compared to the upcoming “mock game” the Gators are going to do this weekend.

Sumrall explained that the idea of the mock game is more to run through unusual situations that might pop up during a real game that teams may not touch on during a normal practice:

“So this is something I've done as a head coach that I really value in that I think helps our players understand what next week looks like when it's real. And so what we do is go through the entire week like we're in a game week, and the practices look identical the whole week. 

And then Saturday we'll go do a mock game. That mock game on Saturday is not like a scrimmage. It's like helmets, shoulder pads, and it's all the crazy situations that can come up in a football game. 

You know, now in our game we have kick after a fair catch in our game that the NFL's had forever, the fair catch free kick deal. It's a run-through. It's a run-through. And it'll be charted, and it'll be hey, the center's helmet comes off. Well, now you have to bring another center in. And how do we do that? Who do we move over in, and how do we work all those things? And so how to take a safety if you need to in a certain game, and how to kick off after safety, kick off return after safety. Now the ball's on the 20-yard line, not the 35. 

So all those things that come up that we have to work to be able to handle the first time it happens in a game. Some of them may never happen all year, but you just want to have those boxes checked.” 

Details never mattered under Billy Napier

Dead horse.

Billy Napier.

Same thing.

But the reason why Florida fans are looking for any kind of sign that things are going to be different is that the Gators couldn’t even execute a basic field goal scenario without something going wrong, let alone a situation that might have been unusual.

Would Napier even know college football implemented the fair catch free kick rule the NFL has, let alone know what to do in that scenario? Part of Napier’s problem is that even when he made the right choice in an unusual situation, such as the timeout he took at the end of the Texas game last year, he was seldom able to articulate why it was the right choice.

As with everything with Sumrall, we will believe it when we see it for real. But the fact that he is aware of these things in the first place is an encouraging sign for the 2026 campaign.

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