Why Jon Sumrall's dual Tulane/Florida role wouldn't have worked for Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss
Published 14 days ago • 7 min read
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Why Jon Sumrall's dual Tulane-Florida role wouldn't have worked for Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss
Jon Sumrall in an Oct. 2024 press conference (Tulane Green Wave on YouTube.)
This year's wild 12-team version of the College Football Playoff kicks off Friday night with Alabama-Oklahoma, one of four first-round games across Friday and Saturday. But while the unprecedented two games involving Group of Five teams (James Madison-Oregon and Tulane-Ole Miss) have the larger spreads (20.5 and 16.5 points respectively in favor of the Power Four teams, versus Alabama being favored by 1.5 points against the Sooners and Texas A&M favored by 3.5 against Miami), they're fascinating in their own ways. One is for the chance of an upset, while another is just for the novelty of Group of Five teams actually getting to compete for a legitimate shot at a national title. And a third remarkable element on the business side comes from Tulane-Ole Miss, featuring two teams that have taken dramatically different approaches to coaching changes.
As discussed here earlier this month, Ole Miss is now under a new coach, previous defensive coordinator Pete Golding. That's thanks to head coach Lane Kiffin leaving for the LSU job at the end of the regular season. Kiffin took a ton of media criticism for that decision with Ole Miss still set for a playoff run; in response, he said he wanted to keep coaching the Rebels through the CFP, but the administration insisted he fully leave if he was taking the Tigers' role. And there's logic to that.
However, people will undoubtedly contrast Kiffin's move with what's going on with Tulane's Jon Sumrall. Sumrall is continuing as the Green Wave's head coach through the CFP despite taking the HC role at Florida (and starting to work there as well; in particular, he and his new staff grabbed 18 players for Florida on Early Signing Day and kept/acquired 14 for Tulane). The two setups are far from equivalent, though, and the highly unusual approach Sumrall is taking only works because of the specifics with him, Tulane, and Florida.
The critical point to understand with big-time U.S. college football is that the inequity between teams is much more pronounced than it is in most professional sports leagues. And that's especially true when it comes to shifts between P4 and G5 teams, which are essentially in different leagues that sometimes compete against each other.
Yes, the pros have notable disparities between franchises too. We've seen those especially in leagues without salary caps such as MLB and most soccer leagues worldwide. And there are plenty of cases in organizations like MLB of coaches or executives shifting to a higher-budget team (although not frequently mid-season); Kiffin's Ole Miss-LSU move has some similarities to things we've seen there, like perhaps when Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein went from the Padres to the Red Sox in 2002.
But the Tulane-Florida divide is far larger than that. It's not even comparable to one division down in European soccer leagues, as promotion and relegation means teams can move up or down in a way that's generally not possible in college football (conference realignment is a much weaker and more chaotic version of this that extends far beyond the field). The gap between an American Athletic Conference school and a SEC school is more similar to the divide between top-division and third-division soccer teams; they might meet on a rare occasion in a cup competition, but their goals, resources, and competitors are incredibly different and largely not overlapping.
This is why it's even possible for someone like Sumrall to simultaneously be coaching at Tulane and Florida. (And it's notable that North Texas, who the Green Wave faced in the AAC title game to determine who would get the playoff berth, had a similar setup, with Eric Morris headed to Oklahoma State but saying he would stay with the Mean Green through the CFP if they made it; with them making a regular bowl game instead following the Tulane loss, though, that set up a more standard transition). But it still takes a remarkable person and a remarkable agreement from both employers to make a situation like this work. And pieces from Ross Dellenger at Yahoo and Brandon Marcello at CBS this week illustrate just what a juggling act it is for Sumrall, who's been regularly getting just four hours of sleep, flying back and forth between cities, and more. Here are some quotes from Dellenger's piece:
In a snapshot of this juggling act, on a recent Monday, Sumrall led practice in the morning in New Orleans, flew to Gainesville for his introductory news conference (he watched Tulane practice film on the flight) and then flew back Monday evening to be there for another practice Tuesday morning.
...But why keep a coach around who’s leaving?
“We believe it’s the right thing to do for our student-athletes and it gives us the best opportunity to win those games,” athletic director David Harris says.
...Sumrall took the Tulane job two years ago for a reason, he says. He wanted his next job to be one of the jobs.
“I wanted a dream job,” he says. “Those are Florida, LSU, Texas, whatever, to me. The journey has been crazy. Knowing that I was going to go to Florida … I didn’t think about that 'til Sunday morning. Woke up Sunday morning and I was going to tell my team that day. My wife looked at me, ‘You’re going to be the head coach at the University of Florida.’ I’m like, ‘I know, it’s crazy.’”
And from Marcello's piece:
"It became clear it was the right decision to make," says Tulane athletics director David Harris. "It gave us the best chance to win, and it felt like it was the right thing to do for everyone involved."
..."He's Roll Waving while he's here. You don't have to worry bout that," says offensive coordinator Will Hall, who has been tabbed to replace Sumrall as Tulane's head coach.
..."Tulane gave me an opportunity to finish this the right way with our team," says Sumrall. "I'm forever indebted because, man, these opportunities to play in this type of situation -- are you kidding me? You get an opportunity to be one of 12 teams still pursuing the main goal at the end of the year.
"I'm also ridiculously grateful to Florida. They're not asking me to leave this place the wrong way. They've been awesome."
There are several further key elements in those pieces on why this unusual situation worked this time. One is Sumrall's passion for Tulane and New Orleans (he announced a previously-planned $100,000 donation to the Green Wave's NIL fund earlier this week, and is keeping the parade-route condo his family and other coaches' families rent through Mardi Gras). Another, perhaps even more important one, is the way both programs have deployed supporting staff specifically focused on their own missions.
At Florida, the Gators have brought in former NFL GM and personnel exec Dave Caldwell as the team's GM. They've also added OC Buster Faulkner (from Georgia Tech) and DC Brad White (from Kentucky), as well as some other staffers. At Tulane, the Green Wave have given Hall the full HC titleand the power to prepare for 2026. And Hall and Sumrall are even working together on which staff will stay at Tulane after this season and who will follow Sumrall to Florida. Here's what Hall told Marcello on that front:
"We were pretty upfront with each other from the beginning," says Hall. "He's got the bigger budget, so obviously he leads the charge on that.
"He's working on '26 with Florida, I'm working on '26 with Tulane. More than that, we're working on '25 with Tulane. We really want to win this game."
There are lots of potential takeaways from this. The first is that this is an amazing and perhaps even Platonic ideal of an orderly transition, with Tulane and Florida content to share Sumrall for the moment, with both trusting him to do what he needs to for their specific goals, and with both also surrounding him with others who can support on those missions. It has everyone being adults and trusting each other, and it seems like it may help all three of Tulane '25 (no coaching change ahead of a playoff game), Tulane '26 (the greatest chance of a at-least-close result on the marketing stage of a playoff, plus the groundwork already laid for the Hall regime), and Florida '26 (the pieces are already coming together with some supervision from Sumrall, certainly more than he could deploy in a situation where he didn't take another job until after the playoff; the early move let him get this job, which would not still be open, but the allowances for continued Tulane work helped the Gators get him).
However, the other key takeaway from this situation is that it simply would not work under most circumstances. And thus, it shouldn't be casually deployed to criticize Kiffin, LSU, and Ole Miss. While the Tigers' resources are significantly more than what the Rebels have (which is a big part of why Kiffin would make a move within a conference), they're not the order-of-magnitude difference of P4 versus G5. Ole Miss and LSU are in direct competition for many players and staffers; there isn't as much of the dynamic Hall described of "He's got the bigger budget," where Tulane is largely fighting for recruits and staffers overlooked by the likes of Florida. But it seems quite smart of the Gators and Green Wave to both recognize that, and recognize that while Sumrall has obvious conflicts of interest in this temporary dual role, those are less likely to provide actual conflicts than they would in a P4-to-P4 transition.
The Sumrall case is worth close observation as an example of how well even unusual situations can seemingly work with the right levels of trust. And it is a counterexample to the criticisms previously levied here on how college football's lack of overarching structure generally necessitates poor-timing moves like Kiffin's. But this is a rare situation, not a generalized exemplar. And while it's great that this one seems to be working for everyone involved, it shouldn't be used as a case in point to bash every coach who fully switches jobs before the end of the season. The partial switch appears to have worked here, but that's only thanks to a remarkable and unusual situation.
