Plenty of twists and turns remain in the ongoing Lane Kiffin saga, but Friday morning brought our first concrete update after days and weeks of speculation: According to ESPN's Pete Thamel, the Ole Miss head man appears to no longer be considering the Florida Gators as he tries to figure out his next move. We've yet to hear anything official, but Thamel reports that "irregular communication" between Kiffin and UF has the Gainesville contingent convinced that he's whittled his options down to jumping to LSU or staying in Oxford.
If true, that's just one more blow in what's been years full of them on the heels of the disastrous Billy Napier era. This is a program in desperate need of some juice as it looks to avoid falling any further in the SEC pecking order; but after missing out on their clear-cut top choice, it's unclear exactly where that juice could come from. It's a mess that goes far beyond one coach's decision, and everyone's got some blame on their hands.
Why didn't Florida make a run at Lane Kiffin last offseason?
To be clear: It's not like this was hindsight. Plenty of people were calling for Florida to axe Napier at various points last year, even after he started to turn things around with young QB DJ Lagway at the helm — a rebound that included a stirring win at home over Kiffin's Ole Miss to help keep the Rebels out of the College Football Playoff. Sure, Lagway showed promise to go with his five-star pedigree; but was that brief flicker of life worth doubling down on a coach who manifestly did not seem like the man for the job?
Florida AD Scott Stricklin decided that the answer was yes, whether because of Napier's buyout or (short-sighted) fear of losing Lagway to the transfer portal or just blind faith that his handpicked hire might somehow still work out. And it turned out that making a program-defining decision based maybe two years of eligibility for a single player wasn't the tightest process: Lagway has spent seemingly the last 12 months battling one injury or another, and Napier started 3-4 this season before finally getting canned.
If the Gators had pulled the plug last winter, Florida would have been the clear best job available; the only other Power 4 gigs that made changes at head coach were West Virginia, Purdue, Wake Forest, Washington State, UCF and UNC. If they'd wanted to throw the bag at Kiffin, there would've been nothing stopping them, and they probably would've gotten their man. Instead, they waited one more year, and now they're swimming in the same waters as fellow SEC programs like LSU and Auburn — not to mention other openings like Penn State.
Florida should, by all rights, have had its pick of the litter. They wound up settling for scraps instead, and after finishing third in the Kiffin sweepstakes, they're left in an impossible position that could reverberate for years to come.
None of Florida's potential Lane Kiffin replacements inspire a ton of confidence
With Clark Lea and Eli Drinkwitz now among the coaching candidates who have taken themselves off the board by signing massive extensions with their current schools, the fallback options for Florida are drying up in a hurry. The Gators now face the worst of both worlds, needing to make a hire from a position of desperation rather than a position of strength. And the three names left standing in connection with the job all come with major red flags.
Jon Sumrall
I won't pretend like Sumrall doesn't have plenty to recommend him as a P4 coaching candidate. He was Neal Brown's lieutenant while revitalizing Troy in the late 2010s, then proved himself a quality SEC defensive coordinator at Kentucky before going a combined 41–11 over four years as head man at both Troy and Tulane. He knows how to evaluate and recruit talent in the Southeast, and he clearly knows how to win games.
Then again, you could've said the same things about Napier before he was hired at Florida. The fact remains that Sumrall doesn't have any experience leading a program at the P4 level, and his track record as a head coach is still relatively limited. (It's not like Tulane was in dire straits when he took the reins from Willie Fritz.) He's never won recruiting wars at the level he'll need to at Florida, and the bar for success is higher than it was when he was an assistant at Kentucky. Maybe he's a hit; but it feels just as likely that he fails in a way Gators fans are all too used to.
Brent Key
Again, Key is under consideration for a reason. Tech is a difficult job under any circumstances, a distant second fiddle in its own state with long-standing funding and academic limitations. And that was even more true when Key took the helm on an interim basis, left to manage the smoking crater that was all that remained of the Geoff Collins era. It felt like Key had the interim tag removed more by default than anything else, and all he's done since is make three bowl games and have the Jackets sitting at 9-2 heading into their rivalry showdown with Georgia on Thursday night.
But again, that's just three full seasons of head coaching experience at any level, And those three years have resulted in records of 7-6, 7-6 and 9-2 — admirable given the circumstances, to be sure, but is that really the sort of resume that Florida should be aspiring to? Especially considering that Tech has racked up that record in a flagging ACC, with once-landmark wins over Florida State and Clemson looking far less impressive in hindsight.
Key has Nick Saban experience from his time as Alabama's offensive line coach, and he's got plenty of recruiting juice in Florida's footprint. Still, we have vanishingly little evidence that he can win at the level the Gators expect.
Jedd Fisch
There's some irony in the fact that, while Fisch is probably the third choice for most Florida fans right now, he might just be the best man for the job among the available options. He's a Florida alum, for starters, and he's navigated rebuilds at not just one but two different Power 4 programs.
Arizona looked to be on life support in the wake of Kevin Sumlin's firing, but after a 1-11 start, Fisch went 5-7 and then 10-3 over the next two years. The situation wasn't as dire at Washington after Kalen DeBoer left for Alabama, but DeBoer took everything that wasn't nailed down with him to Tuscaloosa, and Fisch has still gone a respectable 14-10 over his first two seasons in Seattle.
Again, we're not talking about the most robust resume here. But this is the situation Florida finds itself in, through a combination of bad luck and its own incompetence. Fisch has a lot left to prove as a top-tier FBS head coach, but he knows the area and has done more with less in each of his last two stops — including one in the Big Ten. At this point, the Gators might be in a position where all they can do is try to avoid an outright disaster, and Fisch provides a reasonable floor if nothing else.