Florida EDGE talks dealing with social media criticism
Florida’s 5-3 record looks good on the surface, but poll any random Gators fan on the street and you’re at risk of hearing a long list of criticisms regarding the coaches, players and program.
College football fans will be college football fans, right?
The social media age has exponentially increased the amount of armchair coaches across the country, and the SEC features the most critical of such fans. Gator Nation expects excellence, and the Gasparilla/Las Vegas/Duke’s Mayo Bowl isn’t cutting it.
The players hear all that noise, especially when scrolling through X (formerly known as Twitter) after a game. Win or loss, someone on the internet is upset and tagging a player with several expletives attached. It’s rare, but sometimes those player respond.
In the build up to the Georgia game, it was Florida edge rusher Princely Umanmielen who couldn’t help but clap back at a fan.
“You Twitter coaches are hilarious,” Umanmielen wrote Oct. 26. “I was supposed to do that. But let y’all tell it.”
Following the Georgia game, wide receiver Ricky Pearsall took to X to call out a Gators fan calling for quarterback Graham Mertz to “take off the 15 jersey.”
Umanmielen admitted on Monday that he hasn’t gotten much better at blocking out the noise. Strength and Conditioning coach Mark Hocke has worked with him on tuning things out. Umanmielen says there’s more that he doesn’t respond to than he does.
“I’m learning. It’s really hard because it’s not like I just want to, you feel me, go at people,” he said. “I feel like I have to be defending myself sometimes, because people looking with a blind eye. But, yeah, I’m learning.”
Umanmielen knows the criticism will only get worse once he reaches the next level, too. Figuring out how to deal with it now will be key to keeping clear head in the pros.
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