Saturday night’s football game between Auburn and Florida inside Jordan-Hare Stadium is getting a fraction of the national attention that Lane Kiffin and the LSU-Ole Miss showdown in Oxford is receiving.
Yet it’s every bit as big from a program building standpoint.
Auburn’s Alex Golesh and Florida’s Jon Sumrall are first-year Southeastern Conference head coaches who parlayed success in the American Athletic Conference at the University of South Florida and Tulane, respectively. They are both 2-0 at their new locales, and they have both returned to the SEC, with Golesh having been Josh Heupel’s offensive coordinator at Tennessee in 2021-22, and with Sumrall having been Kentucky’s inside linebackers coach in 2019-21.
“He said we were friends? Not this week, we’re not,” Golesh said in a news conference earlier this week. “I’ve got a ton of respect for Jon. We were both assistants in this league at the same time, and he did a great, high-end job at Troy. He did a high-end job at Tulane, too, and I have a ton of respect for how he works and a ton of respect for who he is.
“I think he does it the right way and competes like crazy. I’ve got a lot of respect for him, but this week I don’t care.”