Florida’s place in USA Today’s preseason All-SEC poll says plenty about how the league views Jon Sumrall’s first Gators team: respectable, but not yet a roster loaded with obvious stars.
The Gators were slotted ninth in the 16-team conference, and they were one of four schools that did not land a single player on USA Today’s preseason All-SEC team. Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Mississippi State also came up empty.
That ranking comes after Florida’s rough 4-8 season in 2025, a year that marked the program’s fourth losing campaign in five seasons. Sumrall was hired from Tulane on Nov. 30 and quickly went to work reshaping the staff, bringing in two coordinators with Power 4 experience: Buster Faulkner from Georgia Tech to run the offense and Brad White from Kentucky to coordinate the defense.
One of the biggest omissions from the preseason team is junior running back Jadan Baugh. He finished third in the SEC in rushing last season with 1,170 yards and totaled 10 touchdowns, eight on the ground and two as a receiver. Still, the 6-foot-1, 228-pound back was edged out by Missouri’s Ahmad Hardy and Ole Miss’ Kewan Lacy for the top two spots.
Hardy is coming off an offseason in which he recovered from a gunshot wound to his leg, and he led the SEC with 1,649 rushing yards and 16 touchdowns last season. Lacy wasn’t far behind in yardage, piling up 1,567 yards, and he led the conference with 24 rushing touchdowns.
Sumrall, 44, will get his first SEC media days stage on July 22 in Tampa. He’ll be joined by Baugh, junior linebacker Myles Graham and sophomore wide receiver Vernell Brown III.
The preseason poll was voted on by 15 members of the USA TODAY Network who cover the SEC. Texas earned nine first-place votes and Georgia got six. After them came LSU, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Missouri, Auburn, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Mississippi State and Arkansas.
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For Florida, the timing stings because this is the kind of player the Gators have to keep landing if they want to close the gap in the defensive backfield race. Georgias early 2027 haul now sits at nine blue-chip commitments, and Cole gives the Bulldogs a key piece in the back end while leaving Florida still searching for answers in a part of the roster where every miss gets magnified. [Read more 🡒]
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The bigger question hanging over Florida is whether a quieter spotlight might actually help. After the Billy Napier era, expectations around the Gators have shifted, and that can cut both ways for a first-year staff trying to reset the tone. Sumralls background and the production those three players brought last season give Florida some talking points, but the real intrigue is how the program plans to handle the pressure that comes with being viewed differently than it was a year ago. [Read more 🡒]