Jon Sumrall’s ice cream analogy reveals what Florida has been missing

Time and time again, we here at Hail Florida Hail stated that one of the very real problems of the Billy Napier Era was a coaching staff that seemed determined to get its flowers the instant anything went correctly. It was a staff that lived online and sought validation and seemed aghast at the mere suggestion that they weren’t SEC-level coaches. Everyone who interacted with Napier himself would comment on how genuine a human being he was, and kept saying what a great person he was.

The problem is that being a people pleaser didn’t result in wins. Jon Sumrall seems to understand that, and while he isn’t being antagonistic towards anyone, he made it clear that strong leadership sometimes means you aren’t a liked person.

Jon Sumrall not interested in being the ice cream man

Sumrall got to talk about ice cream during his press conference on Tuesday. He wasn’t referencing his favorite flavors, though; he was talking about the need for everyone on Florida’s roster to be able to lead themselves and the need for guys to call each other out if they aren’t doing that.

It was at this point that he brought up a quote he said he learned from Nick Saban:

“If you want to be liked, don't lead; go sell ice cream. Sometimes, as a teammate, you have to do some things that your friends or teammates don't like if you want to hold them to the fire of being great. 

And we have to get to where guys are comfortable calling each other out. And then we also have to have the guys that need to be called out. They have to listen. They have to follow. They have to take the instruction. And so I think we have some guys who want to lead. I think we have a lot of guys who are eager. We have to have everybody on the same page, headed in the same direction.”

At the tail end of the Dan Mullen Era, this seemed to be a problem, and no one seemed to want to lead. The Billy Napier Era seemingly started out trying to hold guys accountable, which included kicking Brenton Cox Jr. off the team. Chris McClellan noted after Napier’s first season that “No disrespect to Coach Mullen, but from what I’ve heard from the older guys, they had a lot more leniency with the last staff than they do with this staff.”

Even though the Napier Era didn’t have a rash of scandals and players seemed to play hard, it was clear there wasn’t an edge to the squad.  It was clear that Napier wasn’t interested in holding players' feet to the fire when they couldn’t execute simple tasks.

So as time marches on, we’ll see how much of Sumrall’s talk is real and how much of it is just offseason press fodder. But when it is March, it is better to have hope of a brighter future than be resigned to the idea that nothing is going to change.