by Patrick Zier | Nov 5, 2026 |
Florida has always had the talent. That’s never been the question. The potential is always there. Over the years, Florida has proven that when the pieces are put together right, as happened most recently with Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer, this team can deliver a gut punch that will stagger anybody. In the SEC, other teams eye Florida like a smoking volcano, knowing it can erupt at any time and treading lightly when they are around it.
The problem is that in recent years, the eruptions have been few and far between. Jon Sumrall was hired to change that, to fix it, and he genuinely believes that he can. He is not overconfident, but he has a definite view of how the pieces fit and thought they could be put back in place fairly quickly, like even this year.
There appears to have been progress, but a lack of consistency has kept Florida from grabbing the top rung, from taking its place with Georgia, Alabama, LSU, Texas and maybe a couple others who annually fight for supremacy in what is, with apologies to no one, not the Big 10 or anyone else, the best conference in college football.
So what now? The season is winding down and Florida has no more statement games on its schedule and it will not win an SEC championship. But it saw what it’s like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the big boys. It tasted that respect when Ole Miss, then the No. 4 team in the country, came into Gainesville fresh off an extremely emotional win over LSU and staggered out of town after taking a 52-17 pounding from Florida.
And the next week, now ranked No. 8 nationally and with everybody pointing at the Gators and saying ‘watch out for those guys,’ Florida face planted at Missouri. And then it face planted again against South Carolina. The Ole Miss win was, it turned out, another brief moment of glory, something that was not sustainable.
With the Gators getting ready for Oklahoma, Sumrall reflected on all this at his weekly press conference as reported on Florida’s football website. Oklahoma is the first of the four games left to go. All are winnable but the Sooners and then Kentucky the following Saturday could be trouble, and Sumrall must get this team motivated and ready to play, or the bottom could fall out.
“Well, undefeated is clearly off the table but that has been for several weeks,” Sumrall began. “I told our team we’re 5-3 and 3-3 in the conference. I also told them we’ve got a lot left to play for. You know, we’re in a situation, as we enter November and November football, we haven’t had a winning SEC record here since 2020, I believe.
“We have a chance to do that and that’s a pretty substantial goal. It’s not like I’m comfortable just having a winning record, but we have to find ways to continue to grow as a program so that’s something to me and then look, we have to take it one day at a time,” Sumrall said. “We have 25-ish days left until the last regular season game.
“There’s a lot left to play for,” he repeated, “and I showed our team what that looks like. And to be honest with you, after you go into a game (Georgia) that’s as hyped up as last week’s was sometimes you wonder ‘man, how much gas is left in the tank emotionally?’
“It’s something I have to help them understand,” Sumrall commented. “It’s like guys, you sign up for the whole year and what does that look like? We got to finish this thing the right way. So there’s still, to me, a lot left to play for,” Sumrall said again. “And we have to have enough pride in ourselves to play hard no matter what’s out there.”
“How you finish matters,” he emphasized. “I think, as you look down this last stretch, we’ve got three conference games and a rivalry game (FSU) at the end. We need to finish strong to create some positive momentum as we go into the offseason.
“Just find a way to go 1-0 every week for the next four weeks and when you look up, who knows where you stand at that point in the chaos we’re all in in college football right now? Like if you can find your way to 9-3 at the end, man, there’s a lot of possibilities that can happen with what else is going on in the world.
“What we have to do a better job of is taking care of what’s right in front of us. I want to finish well, I want us to grow as a team and grow the program so that we can have a future here that goes ‘all right, we’re turning in the right direction and we’re about to get this thing really started,'” Sumrall said.
“I have championship expectations every day,” Sumrall went on. “We’re not there yet and that’s frustrating as hell but we’re going to get there, we are. I’m very confident of that.” Could be. But not this year.
by Patrick Zier | Oct 30, 2026 |
Okay, let’s give it up for Kyle Larson. He’s on a late season tear that, with his win at Talladega, has all but clinched the 2026 Chase championship. And with six Chevys taking the first six spots, you might think that’s a real show of force.
Except that superspeedway races are a mirage, something you think you see that isn’t really there. Winning is simply a matter of luck. Avoid the big wreck and be in the right place at the right time on the last lap and you’ve got a chance.
Now, we can throw Larson out of that equation. He’s an outlier because he’s demonstrated that he compete on other venues as well. But Chevy, not so much. The NASCAR point standings will tell you different, but they were never designed to reflect competitiveness.
Example. After the first 26 races this year, which is the last time they were compiled before being retabulated to create a separate point system for the 16 drivers in the chase, Larson ranked seventh with 724 points. And who was eighth? Well, I’m glad you asked. None other than Larson teammate Chase Elliott, who had 723 points. In other words, Elliott was running just as well as Larson.
Now if you follow NASCAR, you know that’s ridiculous. Elliott is emblematic of the crisis facing Chevy this year. He has not run well, he hasn’t been competitive since very early in the season and he appears to be getting worse, not better.
You can go through the NASCAR point standings and find all kinds of instances like this. Daniel Suarez, who drives for Spire, Chevy’s No. 2 team, has really only been competitive in one race, the spring race at Charlotte, a rain shortened event which he won. Yet Suarez is 11th in the final regular season point standings with 676 points, just 48 behind Larson.
One of the main problems with the NASCAR point system is that it is based on incremental scoring, which, after the first finisher, awards one less point per position. In other words, second place gets 35 points, third 34, etc. But this doesn’t tell you anything about how competitive the car was.
Which is why the Old Guy Sport competition index, which is based on top five finishes and leading laps under green, is a much better indicator of who is running well and who isn’t. And it shows that Chevy, despite Larson’s strong showing, is in deep trouble.
Two things are obvious from the OGS standings. One, Chevy was way behind Toyota and behind Ford early in the season, and while Ford has picked up the pace in the second part of the year, if anything, Chevy has gotten worse.
The OGS competition index reflects this.
Larson had 266 points in the first half of the season (remember, the OGS competition index does not include superspeedways) and 275 so far in the second half. Elliott had 181 the first half and 41, a drastic drop, since then. William Byron only had 76 the first half and has even fewer the second half, just 58, while Alex Bowman, who missed five races with vertigo the first half, had just 30 and has added 50 since.
Chevy was dealing with a redesigned car this year, so you expect growing pains, but despite all the attention he’s getting now, Larson’s team figured things out early on and has gotten better since then. The other three Hendrick cars, and particularly Byron and Bowman, have regressed and they were never very good to start with.
It has been said that the Chevy teams do not share technical information, that they keep things in house, but based on performance, you have to wonder if the Hendrick cars even share with each other. How can Larson be so much better than everybody else if the same resources are available to everyone?
And this is a major problem for Chevy, because unless it figures things out in the offseason, it will go into 2027 way behind the other brands, who continue to improve. Like they say, if you’re not getting better, you’re falling behind. And Chevy is falling behind; way behind.
“I would say early in the year I recognized that we weren’t where we needed to be with our car,” Larson said during his post-race press conference at Talladega as reported on NASCAR’s website. “Then you hear about all the different drivers in the sim (race simulator), them having good days, us not. I don’t do any sim.
“I kind of committed myself to, all right, let’s give the sim a chance,” Larson said. “That’s one area where I feel like it’s helped us. Then I just have more time. I just have more time to dedicate to the Cup stuff. I chose to race less this year in the sprint car stuff. I feel like I found a good balance there.”
But as NASCAR becomes more and more technical and analytical, the driver has become less important than the car he drives. Larson has proven he’s a winning driver, but if he’s not in a car that’s capable of winning it doesn’t matter. And Larson’s cars are capable of winning. The question is why the other Chevys aren’t.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Martinsville: 1-Ryan Blaney, 2-Joey Logano, 3-Christopher Bell. Last year’s winner in second race at Martinsville: William Byron. Top five in second race at Martinsville last year: 1-Byron, 2-Blaney, 3-Chase Elliott, 4-Ross Chastain, 5-Kyle Larson.
Old Guy Sport Talladega picks: No picks. OGS does not count superspeedway races.
OGS top 10 after 28 races: 1-Denny Hamlin 621 points, 2-Bell 558, 3-Larson 541, 4-Chase Briscoe 477, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 354, 8-Logano 319, 9-Shane van Gisbergen 226, 10-Elliott 222.
OGS top 10 on short tracks (tracks most similar to Martinsville): 1-Blaney 301, 2-Logano 246, 3-Bell 193, 4-Gibbs 188, 5-Hamlin 146, 6-Larson 140, 7-Briscoe, Elliott 102, 9-Reddick 74, 10-Bubba Wallace 57.
by Patrick Zier | Oct 29, 2026 |
TAMPA – Brian Hartline didn’t mince words. It was August, and he was just preparing to start his first season as South Florida’s new coach, replacing Alex Golesh, who had fled to Auburn. “They’ve had some success here the last couple of years, but nowhere near what it should be,” he told On3’s Pete Nakos.
Now Golesh, although he never won an American Conference championship (nobody has ever won a conference championship outright at USF, at least not in football, although the team has tied for a division title) was coming off a 9-3 season that included wins over nationally ranked Boise State, probably the best team in the Group of Six, and Florida in Gainesville. All of a sudden, the Bulls were relevant in the world of college football.
And when Golesh departed for Auburn, he had the second-best winning percentage of any coach in USF history with the exception of Jim Leavitt, who got the program started and had some supercharged seasons along the way, once getting the Bulls as high as No. 2 in the AP poll.
So taking a shot at Golesh, which, for all intents and purposes, is what Hartline did, puts him out on a limb. “The expectation should be to win,” he told Nakos. “The floor here should be a constant chase for the American Conference championship.”
Fast forward to now, this week, when Hartline’s Bulls return to action here against UAB, the first of five straight conference games that will, essentially, determine whether Hartline goes boom or bust. All the games are winable, but none of them are easy with a road game at FAU and a home game against perennial power Memphis looming large.
Hartline still has a path to a conference championship, but it has a lot of twists and turns along the way and USF’s first seven games, which produced a 5-2 record and were, for the most part, uninspiring have done little to instill confidence.
Furthermore, USF has two teams, UTSA and North Texas, above it with no conference losses and four with only one, and UTSA has already beaten the Bulls. So at this point, contending for a title with two conference losses seems to be a ‘What are you smoking?’ kind of thing.
Taking the next step, starting to muscle his way to prominence in the American, Group of Six and beyond, may be more than this team can handle right now. By the end of the season, Golesh’s 9-3 might look pretty good. None of this really bothers Hartline, who continues going about his business and doing his thing, confident the results will come.
“I think to take the next step requires more than, you know, having a successful first year,” Hartline commented. “Like if we go 12-0 in this year I wouldn’t say we took the next step,” Hartline said. “I think taking the next step is, you know, the results matching the expectation. I think the next step is developing something you can sustain over time.
“It’s not a, you know, flash or bust kind of thing,” Hartline remarked. “So I don’t think you can really identify that (when you’ve taken the next step) without consistency over time. But, I mean, obviously, if we want to get where we want to go, we’d love to maximize that first year. And I’m not minimizing that in any way. But I don’t think either way it’s going to be like you check that box.”
Getting to 10 wins, which has only happened twice before in USF history, would be a significant achievement for Hartline given what he has left in front of him. For that to happen, the offense, ranked 84th nationally and eighth in the conference in scoring and 124th in the nation and 13th in the conference in total offense, will have to take a giant leap forward.
And while the defense has been very good, ranking 10th nationally and first in the conference against scoring, it has had a tendency to break down at some inopportune times. “If we take care of business we can still achieve our goals,” Hartline said. “The reality is we’ve got to do a better job.
“In our opinion, we own our own destiny,” Hartline continued. “So, you know, a lot of teams that we’re going to see are above us in the conference, and we have an opportunity to change that. It comes down to getting better each week, like we’ve been saying for the last seven weeks. If we haven’t gotten better, we’re never going to be ready for week seven, week eight, week nine,” Hartline declared.
It definitely won’t be easy. UAB. East Carolina. Memphis. FAU. Tulane. Ready or not, here they come.
