For back-to-back weeks, the Gators were mostly competitive until about five minutes to go in the first half and then the bottom fell out. Perhaps the most concerning part is that even with the benefit of halftime to regroup, Florida has looked lifeless coming out of the locker room for the second half.
Jon Sumrall touched upon the mindset the team had on Saturday and some of the uphill battles he is still trying to fight to get the mindset of the Gators to match his own.
Florida needs to respond better coming out of halftime
At his press conference on Monday, Sumrall touched on the sequence leading into halftime, where Florida didn’t exactly show haste with two minutes to go, and then wound up missing a field goal. The way Sumrall phrased it, it almost sounded like the game was lost right there:
“We're down 17-10. I go in at halftime. We're in a weather delay, and I walk in the locker room, and I look around and I look at the guys, and, man, you would have thought somebody's dog died. I mean, it was like, it's like, man, we lost. I'm like, boys, we're down seven points, and we get the ball to the half. Like, we got a pulse. We got a chance. Life's pretty good here. Let's go.”
It ties into a comment Sumrall would make later on in the press conference when he said:
“I don't want to say we're fragile, but I think we're trying to find ourselves from a confidence standpoint”
And so one has to wonder why that is the case? Is it as simple as the mindset that The Man in the Black Polo instilled into Florida’s roster, and Sumrall is having to weed that out? Is the fact that Sumrall himself admits he tries to be calmer rather than animated when things aren’t going well a subliminal message to his players that something is wrong?
If you want to look ahead and find a bright spot, in time Sumrall will fill Florida’s roster 100% with players who share his mindset. One could argue that Florida’s roster is currently filled with players who chose Florida because they enjoyed the previous staff's siloquies versus the intensity that Sumrall is trying to promote.
But it points to a real flaw for the back half of the season if Florida’s players were that emotionally low at halftime. It paints a picture that once you get ahead of the Gators, they aren’t coming back.
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