This new Florida coach talk about waking up a sleeping giant just makes me think of all the coaches who actully built something. You don't wake a beast by yelling in a press conference. You build it over years with players who grow into the system. This Jon Sumrall fellow might be a fine coach, but the instant pressure to win with a roster full of mercenaries is the opposite of what this sport was.
It reminds me of when Coach Rich Lackner took over our program back in the day. He didn't come in promising to wake anything up. He promised to build men, to teach discipline, to install an identity that would last longer than any one recruiting class. We didn't have fifty guys in the portal. We had a locker room full of kids who chose Carnegie Mellon for the education and the chance to compete. They learned the playbook inside and out over four years, not four months.
Now you've got these new coaches at places like Oklahoma State bringing in fifty transfers. Fifty! That's not a football team, that's a convention. How do you build any camaraderie, any trust? Coach Lackner would have looked at that and just shaken his head. You can't forge a brotherhood in a single spring. It takes years of shared struggle, of losing games you should have won, of grinding through two-a-days in the Pittsburgh heat. That's what made a coach legendary. Not the number of portal stars you collect, but the number of young men you send out into the world as better people. This new era has forgotten that completely.