New Florida Gators coach Jon Sumrall recently opened up about the other options his new squad was considering while selecting a tactician ahead of the current offseason. On Wednesday, March 4, Sumrall was featured in a video posted by On3 on X/Twitter where he was asked by reporter JD PicKell about the process of becoming the Gators’ main shot-caller.
Sumrall said he had a few doubts initially, as his focus was on his former team, the Tulane Green Wave, and he was letting his agent handle phone calls and messages for him. When Florida reached out, Sumrall thought to himself if the team would be getting other rival coaches instead of him, especially since he had to fill the shoes of former Gators coach Billy Napier.
“Full transparency, I thought, is Florida gonna hire another G5 coach from Louisiana? Probably not. Like, so I went through the first conversation, and you know, I got a lot of respect for Billy (Napier), but Billy and I are not the same guy. And I thought, but just because we, maybe you had somewhat of a similar track record to some degree, that they may shy away from me,” Sumrall said (0:35).
“I did the first conversation, the conversation went great, and I just kind of wrote it off. I’m like, ‘Whatever, we’ll see, I’m going about my business.’ And I really did not even think much about this being an option,” he continued.
Sumrall now enters the Florida-based program with high hopes of bringing them back into the college football playoffs come the 2026 season. This is because the Gators missed out on the postseason in the recently concluded 2025 campaign, finishing with an overall record of 4-8 (2-6 SEC). They were the No. 11 seed in the 2025 SEC standings.
Jon Sumrall Discusses How He And His Family Accepted The Florida Gators Job
During the same interview on the On3 X/Twitter account, he continued his account of how he was named the new Florida Gators head coach and how his family dealt with it.
According to Sumrall, signs were starting to align that the Gators program would likely select him as its new coach, so Sumrall and his family started thinking seriously about it.
“As it kind of became clear that maybe this was something that could be real, the more I kind of vetted it, the more homework I did on it, the more I pulled back the curtain, if you will, to see what was behind the curtain, and kind of got a glimpse of my fit here or my family’s fit here. We felt better and better and better about being at the University of Florida, as that transpired,” Sumrall explained (1:10).
Read More: Pat McAfee Reacts as Jon Sumrall Possibly to Blame for DJ Lagway Decision
Also Read: Who Is Will Hall? All We Know About Tulane’s Jon Sumrall Replacement
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