CARLTON REESE Tracking The Work Of The Deposed Gator Coach: Mullen’s Gone, And What of FSU?
“So the Gators will go into the FSU game something akin to 'Varsity Blues' with no head coach, no offensive coordinator, no defensive coordinator and no offensive line coach. This makes for efficient preparation, how?”
"How much goodwill had Mullen earned for himself entering the 2021 season? Most of us figured quite a bit – he had turned UF from a joke at the end of McElwain’s tenure to one that could legitimately be considered among the handful of teams in the national conversation."
By CARLTON REESE
GatorBait Columnist
In the spring of 2018, Dan Mullen walked the University of Florida football camp, inspecting the carnage left behind in the wake of a disaster from the season before. Mullen was Patton to Jim McElwain’s Lloyd Fredendall, the disgraced commander who failed in his handling of the catastrophe at Kasserine Pass in World War II.
Like the troops Patton inherited, morale was low, discipline lacked and the UF football program was a smoldering mess. The return of Mullen meant a “coming home” of sorts – fans, alums, administrators and boosters alike all shared in the glorious sentiment that the Gators had found the right man. Happy days were soon on the horizon. Indeed, they were.
Mullen graced a hiring class that year which included Oregon’s Chip Kelly, Nebraska’s Scott Frost, Florida State’s Willie Taggart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt and others. Two years later, all seemed gross disappointments save Mullen, who had turned the Gators into a winner playing on New Year’s Day. Even Fisher with his nine losses in College Station was making Aggie fans question that enormous check written out to the former FSU boss.
Mullen’s loss to Kentucky in year one was forgivable, as he came back with road wins against Tennessee and 23rd-ranked Mississippi State. When the Gators beat a top-five LSU team the first week of October, the mediocrity of Jim McElwain had clearly been expunged. Mullen had turned things around more quickly than even the most optimistic of Gator fans had hoped – he was the toast of the town.
After an expected loss to Georgia, there was the puzzling defeat at home to Missouri then what looked like a blowout loss at home to South Carolina. A huge comeback in that game set the stage for a strong finish including a rout of Florida State and a thunderous Peach Bowl win over a top-10 Michigan team. Mullen had salvaged a season that finished with a No.7 ranking, miles from where the program sat a year earlier.
In 2019, the Gators were prominent in the national conversation, and it had everything to do with Mullen, a hot quarterback in Kyle Trask and some spectacular receivers. Nothing changed in 2020 – Mullen kept his Gators in the AP top 10 the entire season and heading into the Cotton Bowl as well. So where and when did it all break down?
On Dec. 11, 2020, Mullen’s Gators enjoyed an 8-1 record, a No. 6 national ranking, a spot secured in the SEC Championship Game and a legitimate opportunity to reach the College Football Playoff for the first time in school history. For Mullen on this night, “white lace and feathers made up his bed – a gold covered mattress on which he was led.”
A lucky man, yes, but on a foggy night at the Swamp all that would change. Marco Wilson’s inexplicable tossing of the shoe has gone down in UF infamy, along with “Fourth and Dumb,” “The Great Florida Flop” and “The Choke at Doak.” A bad LSU team took down the Gators and it should never have happened, and Mullen never recovered.
No matter how admirable Florida was in its loss, there was no way in hell Alabama was going to lose the SEC title game. Hence, all had already been lost against LSU.
Florida’s all-star lineup of gamebreakers was not in the lineup to face an Oklahoma team with a chip on its shoulder and that Cotton Bowl turned into a hall too big to run and hide. Even so, at that point there was no clamoring for Mullen’s head, no reason to believe the final slide of 2020 wasn’t an aberration as to where the program stood.
How much goodwill had Mullen earned for himself entering the 2021 season? Most of us figured quite a bit – he had turned UF from a joke at the end of McElwain’s tenure to one that could legitimately be considered among the handful of teams in the national conversation. It was built over three years and on top of nine seasons as a miracle worker in Starkville, Miss.
Turns out that goodwill never existed. His successes not only as a national championship offensive coordinator at Florida, but as a head coach for nine seasons at Mississippi State and for engineering a remarkable turnaround in less than three years at Florida, actually bought him less security than Taggart had earned heading to Tallahassee. Perhaps that has less to do with what Mullen had earned as opposed to where he was coaching.
Once again, the University of Florida fanbase showed itself to be the impetuous rot that it is – the greatest fans in the game when the tide is high, but the PC babies of college football at the first sign of adversity and any measured temperament displayed on the subject is met with the insults of a vacuous simpleton. It becomes personal: The man in charge is a jerk, or a moron or suddenly grossly incompetent.
In Mullen’s case, he was “a bad recruiter,” so sayeth the subscribers to rivals.com and the basement recruitnik nerds who actually take stock in the off-season standings sent to them in newsletters. A pathetic bunch, really, but who apparently enjoy a good mob or some Robespierre status in its influence of UF football policy.
Because some pedestaled kids decided to back off “commitments” (now, there’s a word these players and their salivating recruitnik nerds surely do not understand), Mullen was now not only losing (temporarily) on the field, he was losing in the most important battle of all: the rivals.com rankings!
A question for the recruitnik nerds among us: Which of the following key components of last year’s Gator team were 5-star recruits – Kyle Pits, Kadarius Toney, Kyle Trask and Trevon Grimes? The answer: None. In fact, Trask and Toney were merely 3-star recruits.
Even if it is true that Mullen can’t get good enough players to Florida and that will never change, then how does showing him the door now create a better opportunity to beat Florida State? Beating your archrival on the field is what this is about, after all, isn’t it?
So the Gators will go into the FSU game something akin to “Varsity Blues” with no head coach, no offensive coordinator, no defensive coordinator and no offensive line coach. This makes for efficient preparation, how? Perhaps the UF administration finds this week of recruiting more important than winning this football game. Perhaps I love competition and beating my archrival – call me ‘crazy’ I suppose – but beating FSU on Saturday means more than any of that other garbage.
It all comes down to this regarding Mullen: the man did a poor job the last seven weeks. Perhaps his quarterbacks let him down with bad reads and poor decisions. Perhaps he failed to recognize some defensive deficiencies in time. Perhaps his banishment from in-person recruiting damaged the UF brand. Ultimately, Mullen is responsible for all of it, and he shoulders the blame. But all of these are correctable and someone with 12 successful seasons as a head coach had earned the opportunity to fix them before tossing the most important game on the schedule into the sewer and starting from scratch.
The Gators take the field Saturday with more talent than the opponent on the other side – of this, there can be little doubt. To make it three straight wins in this series should have taken just the typical inspiration and juice that goes with playing your archrival and now it seems like a roll of the dice. Greg Knox will have been head coach for less than six days when the teams take the field, so it’s been a week of cramming for an exam. The Noles have been studying for this thing all year and their personal tutor will run onto the field with them, giving them a chance they should never have had.
I don’t think I can stomach losing this game, but apparently for the school administration, the recruitnik nerds and the injudicious lot of fans, losing to that school out west just isn’t a big deal.
Thanks for going against the tide of an impetuous fandom, smitten by their “power” to take down a good guy and overall successful head coach. I think partly many of these “fans” perceive themselves to have AD, head coach or GM smarts (from playing Fantasy Football?), and that many of them gamble on Gator games and have lost bundles of money. So they kindle their anger against the focal point of the program. I’ve read essentially lies about Dan Mullen since January. Even though easily refuted, the same “fans” sang them like johnny-one-notes until they got what they wanted. Their dishonesty became accepted “truth”. Heaven help Billy Napier! He’d better succeed quickly and keep it up until he’s identified his…