Jon Sumrall is scaling operations in Gainesville, deploying a massive front office "army" to navigate the blurred lines between traditional college recruiting and NFL-style roster management at Florida.
Florida head coach Jon Sumrall has a few things to learn after his jump from Tulane, a Group of 6 program, to the Gators, a brand name in the SEC.
UF has more resources than Tulane did. The Gators have more resources than most teams in the SEC.
In order to make Florida a contender in the College Football Playoff, Sumrall knows he has to recruit elite players. Part of that recruiting process includes what he told Richard Johnson of CBS Sports was an "army" of staffers in the building at Florida.
Sumrall doesn't want his staffers overstepping their bounds, like negotiating. General manager Dave Caldwell is in charge of the money; other staffers take a back seat to negotiating deals.
"I've never been big into being the one doing the negotiation," Sumrall said. "As a coach, you're involved in all parts of the program. The difference here is the depth of the staff in our front office at Troy was a front office of one or two. Then you go to Tulane, your front office is a front office of eight."
"You come here and you got a front office that looks like an army at times, and so everybody has a very specific role and responsibility. I tell the coaches and everyone in the front office all the time, really, y'all aren't negotiators. There's only a couple of people who actually negotiate deals here. And if you want to be a negotiator, we can reassign you."
Sumrall is trying to find a delicate balance to run operations at Florida. While players get paid, the system in college football doesn't in anyway resemble the NFL. Sumrall has to adapt to the changes that come to the sport almost every offseason.
"We're not the old school college football, but we're not quite the NFL, we're somewhere in-between," Sumrall said. "I think you have to have a merger of thoughts there.
"You can't just say we're going to operate like an NFL Team because we're not an NFL team, but you also can't be stuck in the rigid ways of college football, because you have to adapt and evolve with the new landscape we're in."
One of those adaptations was the transfer portal. Like it or not, Sumrall was unable to add talent after spring football, as the transfer portal didn't open before the summer like it did in the past.
Sumrall will have to work with the players he persuaded and negotiated with early in the offseason for Year 1.