Bianchi: It’s official after Gators crush No. 4 Ole Miss — Jon Sumrall awakens the beast!

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Welcome back, Florida Gators.

We’ve missed you.

We’ve missed you more than you know.

We’ve missed the noise, the swagger, the arrogance, the audacity. We’ve missed the big games in a bonkers Swamp when 90,000 fans show up expecting something spectacular instead of bracing for something stupid. Most of all, college football has missed the mighty Gators being the mighty Gators.

On a sunny, honey of a Saturday afternoon, No. 21 Florida didn’t merely beat No. 4 Ole Miss. The Gators bludgeoned the Rebels 52-28, snapped a 12-game losing streak against Top 5 opponents and sent a message reverberating from Gainesville to every corner of the SEC: The Gators are back. Back among the relevant. Back among the dangerous. Back among the elite.

A week ago, college football was buzzing about Lane Kiffin returning to Oxford to play the program he left high and dry. This week, it’s about the coach Florida hired instead of Kiffin beating the ever-loving Hotty Toddy out of Ole Miss.

Jon Sumrall, take a bow.

“This has very little to do with me,” Sumrall said during his on-field interview afterward.

Puh-leeze.

It has everything to do with him.

Four games.

That’s all it has taken Sumrall to pump more electricity into Florida football than the previous four head coaches could generate with jumper cables and a lightning bolt. Earlier this week, when told the Gators were actually favored over No. 4 Ole Miss by oddsmakers in Las Vegas, Sumrall cracked, “There are a lot of good drugs out there, huh.”

Turns out there is one particularly powerful drug going around Gainesville these days. It’s called belief, and Sumrall has injected it straight into the veins of Gator Nation.

Yes, there were brief bursts of excitement under Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen. But none of them – and certainly not Billy Napier – created this immediate jolt of energy, personality and possibility. The excitement around Florida football isn’t merely palpable; it’s intoxicating.

And nothing demonstrates the difference between Sumrall and Napier more than the offense. Napier stubbornly tried to do everything himself. He surrounded himself with familiar faces and produced an offense that looked like it needed an instruction manual to figure out but was almost always as dull as a butter knife.

One of Sumrall’s first moves? He went out and hired offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner from Georgia Tech and gave him a $2.1 million annual salary – more than any assistant coach in UF history.

What a concept: Hire really good coaches and let them coach.

Florida entered Saturday with the nation’s No. 3 offense after finishing 104th last season. Then the Gators hung 52 on the No. 4 team in America – the most points Florida has scored against a Top 5 opponent since Steve Spurrier’s Gators annihilated Florida State 52-20 in the 1997 Sugar Bowl to win the national championship.

Gator fans, enjoy Faulkner while you can. If this continues, he’ll be a head coach next season. Maybe even in Tallahassee.

That would be appropriate because this offense is starting to look like something out of Florida’s glorious past. With just over four minutes remaining and Florida leading 45-28, the Gators could have run out the clock, shaken hands and called it a day.

Nah.

They threw deep to Eric Singleton Jr., setting up another touchdown and putting 52 on the scoreboard. It was positively Spurrierian. Why kneel when you can score? Why survive when you can humiliate? Why just win when you can make the scoreboard scream?

And nobody is making more noise than Jadan Baugh. The signs in the Swamp said it all: “In Awe of Baugh.” “Run the Damn Baugh.” And the description that seems more appropriate with every passing week: He is Bad to the Baugh.

Baugh carried 29 times for 142 yards and three touchdowns, giving him five consecutive 100-yard games. The only other Gators ever to do that? Emmitt Smith and Fred Taylor.

That’s not a list. That’s a shrine.

Baugh also has multiple rushing touchdowns in five straight games, the longest such SEC streak since Derrick Henry’s Heisman season at Alabama in 2015. And, yes, Baugh was scoring touchdowns and striking the Heisman pose.

Before the game, Florida legend Tim Tebow told the cheering “SEC Nation” crowd in Gainesville: “Some people do the Heisman pose out of hope. I love Jadan because he does it out of belief.”

There’s that word again.

Belief.

Believe it now: Jadan Baugh is a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate.

And here’s the scary part: When Baugh needed a breather, Duke Clark came in and ran for 126 yards himself, including a 45-yard touchdown in which he juked Ole Miss defenders into another ZIP code. Together, Baugh and Clark helped Florida pile up 302 rushing yards and six touchdowns on the ground.

This wasn’t finesse. This was a mugging.

For years, Florida fans kept hearing about rebuilds and patience and culture and process. Enough process. Give them progress. Give them points. Give them victories. Give them Saturdays when the Swamp shakes again.

Sumrall spent the offseason calling Florida a “sleeping giant” and talking about “waking the beast.”

Consider the alarm clock smashed.

Said Sumrall of that sleeping giant: “It’s not asleep, but it ain’t fully awake yet. It’s being stirred up a little bit. We’re going to get there. It’s coming. I didn’t come here for us to be average. We had some recruits here this weekend. We get a lot of those guys to say yes, and we’re going to wake up the beast real fast.”

Florida is 4-0 for the first time since 2019. The Gators have scored at least 50 points three times in four games, only the second time in school history that’s been accomplished. On Saturday, they scored touchdowns on five consecutive second-half possessions against the No. 4 team in America.

Maybe there will be bumps ahead. There always are in the SEC. They still have the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in America – Texas and Georgia – on their schedule. But this feels different, looks different and sounds different. The Swamp is roaring again. The offense is rolling again. A Heisman candidate is posing again. And, perhaps most importantly, Florida football is swaggering again.

For too many years, the Gators kept telling us they were on their way back. On Saturday, they quit sending postcards and finally arrived.

Welcome back, Gators.

College football hasn’t been the same without you.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen.

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