![Florida Head Coach Jon Sumrall speaks during Florida Football Fall camp availability at Heavener Football Training Center in Gainesville, FL on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. [Alan Youngblood/Gainesville Sun]](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_crop,x_0,y_0,w_5000,h_2812/c_fill,w_720,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/images/ReutersImages/mmsport/213/01m089yk6x81n8psjzhk.jpg "Florida Head Coach Jon Sumrall speaks during Florida Football Fall camp availability at Heavener Football Training Center in Gainesville, FL on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. [Alan Youngblood/Gainesville Sun]")
The AP Preseason Top 25 was released today, and the Gators, as in the Coaches Poll, are unranked. This is the 4th time in the last five years the Gators have started the year unranked, which also reflects their unranked finishes over the past five seasons.
Something, something, Billy Napier.
But starting the 2026 season unranked is one final reminder of how bad things got in Gainesville over the past five years, and it reflects more on who the Gators were than who they should be this season.
Florida left unranked once again
Florida received enough votes to be the second-highest unranked team. Basically, Florida comes in at No. 27 in the AP Poll.
There are a lot of ways to interpret this, but we will start with the fact that Florida may be starting the year at No. 27, but to have a successful 2026 campaign, they need to finish the season better than No. 27.
Yes, Florida’s schedule is tough at the top. Georgia is No. 3, Texas is No. 5, Ole Miss is No. 9, and Oklahoma is No. 10. Florida could be the legit No. 11 team in the country and lose to all four, which would drop their ranking. But let’s not act as if the bar has fallen so far that we should expect Florida to be helpless during this stretch. Even Billy Napier found a way to beat Texas last year.
Which brings us to our main point: Florida has a way better roster than the No. 27 team in the country, but has underperformed year after year, so voters didn’t want to risk getting burned once again.Â
It felt like we said every year during the Billy Napier era that his roster was stronger than what the polls indicated. And as a parting gift, Napier did leave behind more than enough talent for Jon Sumrall to work with.
For what it is worth, three teams that started the year in the 2025 preseason top ten finished unranked (Penn State, Clemson, and LSU), but no team that started the year unranked finished in the top ten. Texas Tech was No. 23 in the preseason poll and finished No. 7. BYU started unranked and finished No. 11 in the AP poll.
If one really wants to dream, Dan Mullen was unranked in 2018 for his first season with Florida as the head coach and he finished that year No. 7.
As we’ll state all season, we don’t expect Florida to be a top-ten team right away in the Jon Sumrall era, but it is also okay to set some form of expectations as a bar to clear.
No. 27 isn’t that bar.
Add us as a preferred source on Google