2026 Missouri Football Opponent DEEP DIVE: Florida Gators
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Welcome back to Rock M Nation’s annual opponent preview series of the upcoming season. Each week we will break down one opponent from the schedule in chronological order. Given that rosters are ever fluid – and this is done by a hobbyist rather than a pro – there could be some errors in history and current roster makeup. All mistakes are done on purpose and with ill intent because Nate Edwards doesn’t like you or your team.
Catch up on previous 2026 opponent previews!
When you see the words “Florida Gators football”, what do you think of?
For me, I didn’t pay much attention to Florida until Urban Meyer made his transcendent run at the school from ‘05-10 while winning two national titles, so they’ll always be the transcendent spread offense with a baby rhino at quarterback and the largest collection of elite defensive talent on the planet. But maybe you remember the higher-flying offensive days of Steve Spurrier dropping 50 burgers on the “GRRRRRRRR DEFENSE FIRST” SEC in the 1990s.
If you’re younger than me maybe the “GRRRRRRRR DEFENSE FIRST” applies to Will Muschamp’s version of Florida football, the one where offense nearly disappeared as he won slug fest games 13-10 for four years.
Maybe your vision of Florida football is Jim McElwain humping a shark. Or Dan Mullen trying to incite fans to storm the field and fight a football team during COVID.
My point is, Florida has been many things over the years and it’s hard to nail down one specific identity or one absolute level of competence. And I find that weird for a blue blood of the sport. Every program can make crappy hires and have down years, sure, but Florida’s range of outcomes seems way more diverse than a well-moneyed, deeply storied program in the SEC should be.
I don’t know if anyone can be blamed or if it’s an institutional problem or what, I just find it interesting.
Speaking of interesting, Florida was very much not that in the last season of American collegiate football that they played.
Here’s what Florida did last year:
Imagine a season where you beat the #9 team in the country and then lose to a 5-7 Kentucky. That’s the world Florida lived in last year.
Billy Napier was almost fired in 2024 but did enough with a young, 5-star quarterback that he was inexplicably allowed another year. Then he lost to South Florida in Week 2 of 2025 and that was really all the impetus Florida needed to can him. But they didn’t! And the next week he lost to #3 LSU. And then lost to #4 Miami. And still wasn’t fired!
Then the 8 point victory over Texas occurred unexpectedly. “Oh, is Billy going to once again convince people he can turn this thing around?” people wondered. Then a loss to #5 Texas A&M that wasn’t particularly close. Was he fired? No! Because then he beat Mississippi State by two points and was 3-4 heading into the Bye week.
That is when Florida fired him. Oooooooooooooook.
Florida’s only win the rest of the year was a 19-point beat down over rival Florida State to keep them from bowl eligibility, which had to be one of the most satisfactory “crabs in a bucket” victories of quite some time.
Still, Florida finished the year at 4-8. Yuck.
However, when you are a blue blood program that’s fallen on hard times, all you need to do is fire your coach and then hire the hottest name on the coaching market to turn everything around. Which they did.
Coaching Staff
Jon Sumrall – 1st Year – 0-0 (0-0)
Jon Sumrall is a very good football coach and, seemingly, a very good dude.
He and his family have been active in the communities of the schools that he’s worked at since his days as a position coach. He stood up for New Orleans and the Hurricane Katrina anniversary. And he even donated $100,000 to Tulane’s Green Wave Talent Fund, Tulane’s NIL initiative. Oh, and that last act? He did that after he got the job at Florida as a good will gesture to incoming coach Will Hall and the Tulane athletic program to show how much he appreciated his time there.
I can’t speak to his life outside of the spotlight but, again, he seems like a good dude. And a well-adjusted, normal dude, as well. Which is a rarity in this profession these days.
Coach Sumrall has been a highly-regarded name for the past two coaching cycles before Florida hired him last winter. He’s a defensive coordinator by trade but he’s built very strong programs that have thrived in our modern era of the sport. Getting a G6 team to the 20-40 range in SP+ and earning Playoff berths is not easy, and Sumrall has done that.
I’ve been a big fan of his since he took the Troy job and believe that he’s the exact sort of guy that can get results almost anywhere.
That being said, I believe there is a fair critique you can make of his work so far. Namely: he’s had a head start at the place he’s worked as a head coach before. And, by that, I mean before he was the head coach at Troy he was the Special Teams Coordinator for the Trojans from 2015-2017. He knew the place, he knew the challenges, he at least had some familiarity with the local politics and booster types. Same for Tulane; before he was the head coach there he had three years of defensive coordinator experience at that school. I don’t know how much of an advantage that a coach can glean from that experience, but it’s certainly better than jumping into the head coaching job cold.
And while Sumrall was a linebacker coach at Ole Miss for a year and has three years of experience at Kentucky, he’s never worked at Florida before. And, as you can tell from my walk through their recent past, Florida can be a tricky job to navigate at times.
Maybe he’s good enough to overcome that. Maybe not. But I’m going to bank on Sumrall being really freaking good at his job until proven otherwise.
Assistant Staff
Hold on a second, I want to go on a tangent for a moment and it takes some wind up to get there.
Dan Mullen was Florida’s football coach from 2018 to 2021. And the thing about Mullen is that he’s a “chip-on-the-shoulder” kind of coach; a head coach who does really well in under-funded, historically overlooked programs where he can lean into the “THEY DON’T BELIEVE IN US” mantra, recruit scratch-and-dent players, and use his big offensive brain to scheme up offenses that can hang with elite programs. As an OC at Florida he was able to win championships for Urban Meyer’s recruiting juggernaut by being the best offensive mind at the time. As a head coach, his grumpy outsider schtick only works in certain venues.
Case in point: he did well at Mississippi State. Really well. “Second-most wins in school history” well.
But that type of mentality and behavior doesn’t fly at the flagship school of the state of Florida. One that can recruit really well on its own merits and has all the money in the world to provide…anything that its football coach needs. But Dan didn’t really use those resources to build a big staff or make pushes for 5-star recruits. Dan doesn’t like 5-star recruits! He actively chose not to recruit the highest rated guys because of it! So Dan’s angry-at-the-world approach and lackluster recruiting – paired with somewhat diminishing returns – got him fired.
And then Billy Napier takes the job and promises a “modernization” of the staff, “Alabama-fying” Florida’s football coaching roster by bringing in a massive work force to recruit, train, scout, develop, and manage game day to the microlevel. Beat writers were calling it an “invasion of men in polos”. Napier invented roles that never existed before and hired guys to do it. They had quality control coaches for every position (and each QC had at least one assistant!). Four different dieticians, half for “performance” and the other half for “recovery”. At least two assistants for their three different types of recruiting coordinator. Something called a “Game Changer coordinator”. Plus multiple co-coordinators on both sides, and even two different offensive line coaches and multiple assistant offensive line coaches!
And yet Napier struggled with relinquishing control, so all these roles were created to do a very specific something but had to get approval to do so first, and Napier created so many aspects of a football program he was clearly overwhelmed and missing simple stuff. Whether the team could go for it on 4th down or not: bad call, every time. Personnel packages: frequently wrong. Procedure penalties, sideline warnings, NIL-deal delivery: all getting missed.
It seemed that, in an effort to seem “modern” and find prestige in spending money to create a massive staff of football professionals, Florida allowed Napier to build a machine so convoluted and complex that they forgot to take care of the easy stuff first, leading to 6- and 4-win seasons at multiple-national-title-winning Florida.
So that gets us to today. And in walks Jon Sumrall. He’s still operating with Florida’s budget so he has a much larger coaching staff than even other SEC programs do, but he’s cleaning house and making the whole program management system streamlined (at least, so he says).
(Sumrall did forget to fire one of the assistant offensive line coaches until multiple weeks into his tenure, though. That’s just good comedy.)
And while he did keep Florida’s old defensive line coach Gerald Chapman, everyone else was somewhere else last year, including most of his defensive staff that he imported with him from Tulane.
Getting offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner from Georgia Tech was a coup. Faulkner has been an overlooked and under appreciated coordinator who has built good (and varied) offenses from Arkansas State, Southern Miss, and Georgia Tech. And getting defensive coordinator Brad White – the one competent Kentucky thing over the past five years – is another massive win. The talent is there on this staff, now its just seeing how they work together.
Roster Movement
As I said earlier, Florida is one of the rare schools that can recruit for itself. You could slap a Florida football visor on an ocelot and it could bring in a Top 20 recruiting class, easy. Point being, even bad Florida football teams have extremely talented players on its roster, and when a staff gets fired, the dam of football talent busts and washes over every other power program.
To date, I count only ten of Florida’s 34 portal losses that went “down” in program hierarchy, and half of those were to Appalachian State or South Florida (very good programs) and James Madison (Playoff participant in 2025, also that’s where Billy Napier is coaching now).
Missouri was able to nab receiver Naesehaun Montgomery from this group and there will be plenty of other former Florida players that the Tigers (and the rest of the SEC) will run into this season.
Sumrall and his staff targeted one clear thing in the portal: experience. Yes, Buster Faulkner brought in four Georgia Tech guys with him and Sumrall imported his specialists from Tulane but everyone else were guys who have played multiple years. Part of that might just be what it’s like for a new coach in our modern portal era: flush the old roster, bring in guys that are there because you brought them there, and build from that baseline. The other part might be the aforementioned 34 portal losses. But their goal wasn’t to bring in projects but production, and Florida will have 29 new faces to fill in the gaps.
Again, anyone can recruit Florida and do just fine (unless your Dan Mullen and actively choose to not recruit well). Sumrall’s first high school haul ranked 17th in the nation and 9th in the SEC, with 13 blue chippers in the 19-man class. Edge rusher K.J. Ford probably has the clearest line to early playing time given that new DC Brad White subscribes to the usage of a hybrid linebacker/defensive end role and Florida currently has a lack of JACK-style players on their roster. Also keep an eye on receiver Justin Williams and corner C.J. Bronaugh, some of the highest-rated players to be signed by Florida in the past three years.
Offense
Forget what Florida did on offense last year. What does a Buster Faulkner offense do?
Oh, wait, forget that, too. Faulkner is one of those coordinators who, ya know, looks at the talent on his roster and crafts an offense to fit that. Novel concept, I know.
At Middle Tennessee, Faulkner began as a run-to-set-up-the-pass guy with elite running back Benny Cunningham, then slowly transitioned to a pass-first-efficiency-focused attack once MTSU got its hands on some better receivers. His one year as Arkansas State’s OC featured an offense that was overtly reliant on running the ball and uncorking bombs through the air, while at Southern Miss he relied on Jack Abraham (remember that guy?) to throw it around 400 times with no pretense of a ground attack.
And then we get to the beautiful slop at Georgia Tech. Grumpy Brent Pry specialized in recruiting pure beef for his offense so Faulkner took a quarterback that loved to get hit and ran him and the running backs 50 times per game.
And it worked.
So what will Faulkner craft with the new toys at his disposal? He has a thousand-yard rusher, two unproven quarterbacks with very different skill sets, a bunch of sure-handed receivers, and a patchwork offensive line that doesn’t have one overarching skill set.
I can’t wait to see what this looks like!
Quarterback
Faulkner and Sumrall’s first offensive problem to solve is at quarterback. As previously mentioned, Faulkner portalled in his backup quarterback from last year, Aaron Philo, as a guy who had worked with Faulkner’s book and knew his tendencies. But Philo is hardly a proven commodity, appearing in 8 games over two years while attempting 102 passes and 16 rushes. All fine for a backup, but certainly far from a sure thing.
And then there’s the guy who’s left over from the previous regime: Tramell Jones, Jr. A Top 250 player in high school, Jones was an afterthought freshman at the beginning of the 2025 season but turned many heads in the chances he had on the field. Last year’s team loved him, and he brought an electric athleticism and excitement that tends to be lacking in a 4-win college football campaign. Sumrall and Faulkner have had nothing but positive things to say about him, as well.
So, now what? Older, unproven guy who knows the current coordinator? Or younger, exciting guy with a higher ceiling and lower floor?
Running Backs
Jadan Baugh is a dude. He might not have had the yards per carry average that wows but he was one of the high points of a terrible year at Florida. He managed a 50% success rate despite being the only thing that worked well on offense and having to fight the opposing defenses that only keyed in on him. 10% of his runs went for 10+ yards. and while his yards before contact was a not-so-great 1.78, his yards after contact were in the top quarter of the country at 3.54. Also, he didn’t fumble at all last year!
And with the additions of big-play artists London Montgomery (from East Carolina) and Evan Pryor (Cincinnati), Florida should have enough rushing talent to convince Faulkner to keep his overtly-ground-oriented offense of his Georgia Tech tenure clicking in Gainesville.
Receivers
You could look at the Florida receiving corps and notice that there’s only one player on there that has had a season of over 600 yards receiving (Eric Singleton) and that no one eclipsed that mark last year. Or, you could look at the receiving corps and notice that Vernell Brown was a freshman who played in ten games, and all-world talent Dallas Wilson only played four games last year, also as a freshman. Sumrall mixed in veteran guys to supplement his super young talent and it’s a move that makes all the sense in the world. I don’t know how much this new Florida team will want to throw but the ability to throw is much more enticing thanks to their portal efforts and maturation of younger talent.
Offensive Line
Last year’s offensive line ranked 126th in penalties, a healthy 23rd in pressures allowed, but a very bad 111th in blown run blocks and 77th in overall blown blocks. The two worst starters in missed blocks return from last year’s unit while three portalled linemen try to fill in the gaps. Former Georgia Tech center Harrison Moore was an excellent run blocker. T.J. Shannahan from Penn State was ok at both run and pass blocking, while Stanford’s Emeka Ugorji was a liability in run blocking but decent in pass blocking. A combination of them plus the holdover’s from last year will have their work cut out for them.
Defense
Billy Napier only had one offense rank in the SP+ Top 25, and that was the 2024 group that ranked 23rd. So if his offense stunk, well, yeah, that’s what it always did.
Given that Napier was an offensive coordinator you’d think his offenses would have been better, but the real strength of his Florida teams were his elite defenses that ranked 9th and 2nd in 2023 and 2024 respectively. As Missouri fans, we know how important it is to have an elite-tier defense to pair with an underperforming, run-oriented offense and the downfall of the 2025 Gators was that Napier’s defense had the audacity to slip from Top 10 to Top 50 without his permission.
The biggest issue I see with last year’s group is that they allowed offenses to be comfortably efficient. The Gator defense was able to limit scoring just fine but offenses could steadily move the ball and, eventually, wear Florida out. It didn’t help that this defense ranked 59th in turnovers created for an offense that desperately needed turnover help and finished at a margin of -1 on the year.
The good news, then, is that Sumrall imported a ton of havoc. Bryce Thornton, Myles Graham, Jayden Woods, and Kamran James all bring more than 9 havoc plays a piece back from last year’s group, while impact transfers such as Emmanuel Odeybadajo (Jax State), D.J. Coleman (Baylor), and Jordy Lowery (East Carolina) filter into the vacant spots. Yes, those guys were playing lower-level ball last year; no, I don’t think you’re going to see a huge drop in havoc given their skill sets. Sumrall and Brad White are good identifiers of talent and White’s next bad defense will be his first; much like my statement with Faulkner, I’m going to trust that a Brad White defense will be excellent until proven otherwise.
So what does it all mean?
With the caveat that there are no easy SEC schedules…Florida got one of the easier ones.
FAU and Campbell open the season, and of course the non-con rivalry game against Florida State is the last game of the regular season. But going up against rebuilding Auburn, Lane Kiffin-less Ole Miss at home, then Missouri and South Carolina is about the most manageable opening stretch a team could ask for. I’m not saying Florida sweeps this set of games, mind you, just that it’s not a super demanding stretch of games.
Of course playing at Texas and then the Cocktail Party against Georgia is demanding, but then Oklahoma at home, Kentucky on the road, Vandy at home is much preferable to other options. Hell, ignore the pre-season SP+ rankings: if Florida ends up being even 20 spots better than last year – so 43rd in the country – you could talk yourself into them going 7-5 without a ton of improvement. That’s nice for a first year coaching staff.
Other than the 1965 Sugar Bowl, Missouri and Florida have only played each other as SEC foes, and the series is fairly even with Missouri holding a 7-6 advantage. Since Drinkwitz arrived in Columbia the game advantage has shaken out to “who is at home?”, with hosting teams winning the last four matchups. Florida’s last win in Columbia: 2019. Missouri’s last win in Gainesville: 2018.
I like the staff that Florida has put together here and I believe that it’ll do well long term. As with most of these previews, the question is “will the transfers click?”. I don’t have a great answer for that right now but, as far as the 2026 matchup of these two teams, Missouri will be hosting this one. Maybe that’s all you need!
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