After joining the program on December 1, new Florida Gators head coach Jon Sumrall didn’t waste any seconds settling in. He laid out the first order of business on day one: the last thing you want to be as a Gator is complacent. There’s no room for incompetence under his regime. With spring football around the corner, he made sure to double down on that standard.

“If you are juiceless, you are useless,” Jon Sumrall sent a clear warning to the locker room when asked about the expectations for players in spring practice.

Not gonna lie, that’s a bar you’d usually expect in early 2000s rap drill. Regardless, he’s made it clear that if you aren’t bringing maximum effort and hype to every single drill, you aren’t going to play. Unlike almost 90% of coaches, Jon Sumrall isn’t afraid to talk the talk to his players if he finds them lacking in an era where recruits jump into the portal over minor inconveniences or something a coach said. In fact, Sumrall treats his players like pros.

He’s been very open about the fact that since players are essentially being paid to play. So. they need to act like it. The expectation is that you show up on time, do your job, and don’t complain when things get tough. The former Tulane head coach told the team flat-out that if they think the work is too hard, they should probably find a different school and coach to play for.

He also expects his players to be highly coachable. Sumrall is a “tell it like it is” kind of coach, and he expects his players to take hard coaching without getting their feelings hurt. He wants a team that is physically and mentally tougher than everyone else in the SEC. This reminds us of Kirby Smart when he first joined Georgia back in 2017.

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The former Saban protégé ran a program that rivaled NFL-level tactics and workouts. Word is that practices in Athens are much, much harder than Saturday night football. This tough-love approach has paid dividends for Kirby Smart with fast success: two natties, four SEC titles, and a plethora of double-digit players heading into the draft every year.

Just like Smart, Jon Sumrall is no stranger when it comes to the art of winning. He is the only head coach to win three conference title games in his first four seasons at the Division I level. Arguably the best coaching hard launch in the NIL era. Even more impressive, he has never finished a season with fewer than nine wins in his entire head coaching tenure. And he certainly does not plan to start now, especially in the toughest conference in the country.

Sumrall wholeheartedly believes If a player isn’t willing to be pushed to their absolute limit, they won’t last long in his locker room. Finally, the biggest expectation is immediate results. Unlike Billy Napier or his predecessors, he isn’t asking for a “rebuilding year” or making excuses for being new.

Sumrall expects his players to compete to win every single rep, practice, and game, starting right now. He’s set the bar at a championship level, and he expects every player on that roster to either meet that standard or step aside for someone who will. Only the Orange and Blue game on April 11th shall tell.

However, to make sure everybody earns their due, he’s adopting Urban Meyer’s notorious rituals.

Jon Sumrall follows Urban Meyer’s unique ritual

As a psychological reset, one of the coolest (and toughest) things Sumrall’s doing is making the players earn the logo. Right now, the staff isn’t allowing the team to wear the Gator head on their gear.

“Gotta earn it. Gotta earn the logo,” Sumrall said back in January. “We ain’t earned it yet. We haven’t earned a damn thing. All we’ve got is our name. To wear the Florida Gator logo, to wear the Gators across your helmet, to wear the Gator head, you got to earn that.”

Sumrall expects them to prove they deserve to represent Florida by surviving ‘The Gauntlet’ a series of brutal conditioning tests. He got the former US Navy/Army veteran of 3 decades to oversee this activity. Basically, it’s their version of ‘hellweek’.

If you actually think about it, that’s straight out of Urban Meyer’s convict-Gainesville era. The first thing he did after leaving Utah for the Florida gig was to make sure his players earn their logo. Boy, did he earn it. The very next season, the Gators won the 2006 BCS National Championship. The former Gators coach expects Sumrall to do the same. In fact, he’s one of the key guys who pulled Sumrall to Florida.

Meyer has a relationship with athletic director Scott Strickland, and when asked, he did some research on Sumrall. He watched several interviews to see how Sumrall handled himself and was really impressed. Meyer even joked about Sumrall’s wife being an Auburn fan but said he pushed hard to get Sumrall to become a Gator. That pretty much says everything about him as a coach and a man.