GAINESVILLE, FL – It should’ve been much worse. There’s your takeaway from the biggest win at Florida in years, a statement that signaled, at the very least, the days of wilting in the moment are gone.
They’ve been replaced by bully ball.
Or as first-year Gators coach Jon Sumrall has been saying since the day he stepped on campus: toughest guy wins.
That was Florida flexing, everyone. Taking surging Ole Miss — the hottest program this side of Indiana — back a couple of decades to when these things were inevitable because Florida had the better team and the better coaches.
And wouldn’t you know it, we're back there again after a 52-28 whitewash of the Rebels. All it took was four games — and the right coach.
It wasn’t any of the four previous coaches
who tried for 16 years to replicate what Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer accomplished. It wasn’t the guy Florida fans pined for at the end of last season, who was last seen skulking out of Oxford.
It was a tough, no-frills former SEC linebacker at Kentucky who showed up here and made it clear that he didn’t care how it got to this point with one of college football’s blue bloods, he just knew how to pull it from the abyss.
Tough teams, smart teams, he said over and over, win big. He looked at the faces of those shellshocked players during his first meeting as the coach of a team that had made a habit of losing to Kentucky, South Carolina and Missouri, and promised them he’d have them prepared.
But they better be tough.
So they won on the road last week against Auburn, and set up a prove-it-game against an Ole Miss team that had done nearly everything right in all of six games under coach Pete Golding. Then physically punished the Rebels from the jump.
The rushed for nearly 300 yards. They made big stops on defense. They scored touchdowns on the first five drives on the second half — after leaving Ole Miss breathing room in a first half full of missteps and missed opportunity.
So they gave up a bunch of points again. So it wasn’t the defensive gem they wanted.
They got something much bigger: They’ve turned the damn thing around.
But for that first half of mistakes and missteps, the Gators might have scored 70 on a team that a week ago was the hottest in all of college football after vanquishing Lane Kiffin and LSU. Here's your new darlings in the SEC, everyone.
They run the ball like an old school SEC team. They throw it efficiently and with purpose, just like all of those sleek pass games around the country.
If you thought last week’s dismantling of Auburn’s defense was impressive, this one was downright Spurrier. Ole Miss had no answer for Florida’s multiple and balanced attack.
Couldn’t stop tailbacks Jadan Baugh and Duke Clark, couldn’t cover Florida’s deep and dangerous receiving corps. More than anything, Florida was the toughest and smartest team on the field.
They've got it turned, all right.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB. Listen to him daily, from 12-2 p.m., on 1010XL-Jacksonville.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida is back. Jon Sumrall needed only four games to prove it | Opinion
