These past two weeks for Florida fans have been confounding because of the first four weeks the Gators had. Even when Florida was winning, though, Jon Sumrall did try to warn people that the Gators were littered with problems, and those problems have been on full display over the last two weeks.
Well, he sort of tried to warn us because there has definitely been a bit of messaging from Sumrall that made it seem like Sumrall himself thought Florida has closer to the top than it was to where they are now.
Jon Sumrall’s message has been on both sides
After Saturday’s loss to South Carolina, Sumrall was asked about comments he made after the Ole Miss game that hinted there were still a ton of issues Florida needed to clean up:
“Like I said a week ago, I see us every day. We are very much a work in progress. Even after the Ole Miss game, I was uneasy. We have nowhere, I mean, two weeks ago today, we had nowhere near arrived.
Now we clearly haven't arrived the last two weeks because we've been exposed in a pretty substantial way. And this conference will do it to you. But I think sometimes, and I said this last week as well, sometimes when you're winning, it masks maybe the things that are not going right or that you're not doing well.”
And to be fair, in the aftermath of the Ole Miss win, Sumrall did say:
“We're still not a finished product. But the guys are giving great effort, and they're trying to do what we ask of them. We still didn't play our best tonight."
But if someone is going to take these comments and go “See, Sumrall tried to warn everyone but no one wanted to listen,” we would counter with some other comments he made during the 4-0 start.
Sumrall spent all offseason talking about the need to “wake up the beast” in Gainesville. He also said after the Ole Miss game:
“It's not asleep. But it ain't fully awake yet. It's being kind of stirred up a little bit. So we're gonna get there. But yeah, it's coming.”
We would hope a not fully awake Florida squad would be capable of not getting blown out by South Carolina. If the beast was stirring, did it go back to sleep?
Then there is the speech Sumrall gave his team in the week leading up to the Ole Miss game, where he stated at a team meeting that:
“So that everybody f***ing knows the f***ing Florida Gators are back. They’re f***ing back!”
We’ll take Old Takes Exposed for $600, Alex.
And we will admit that we too tried to hop on the hype train. After the past five years in Gainesville, we tried to stay on the positive side of things. Even if you take the emotion out of it, computer models had Florida with a 50/50 shot at making the playoffs, and Florida was a Vegas favorite the past two weeks.
Sumrall can claim he tried to warn everyone, but his own words, combined with what the people who build skyscrapers in the desert thought, suggested a team that should have been better than getting blown out in back-to-back weeks.
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