More changes are inevitable for Mullen, Gators

Following the 2016 season in which Notre Dame went 4-8, capping a three-year run of disappointment (22-16 record), Brian Kelly did a no sacred cows evaluation of his football program. Recruiting was poor. Discipline was lacking. Players were unhappy. The coaching staff seemed to have gotten complacent and the strength and conditioning staff just wasn’t getting the job done.

Kelly was thought to have one foot out the door when he and athletic director Jack Swarbrick came up with a plan to revitalize the football program. They interviewed everyone on the staff. They interviewed players. They asked tough questions and then listened carefully to their answers. When that was over and done with the decision was a complete overhaul of the football program was a necessity.

Then came the tough part. Coaches were fired, some of them Kelly’s good friends. Some stayed one step ahead of the pink slip by taking gainful employment elsewhere. Offensive coordinator Mike Sanford Jr. took the head coaching job at Western Kentucky (he probably would have been fired if he hadn’t). The entire strength and conditioning staff was replaced and Matt Balis was brought to bring some toughness to the program.

In the years since, Kelly hasn’t hesitated to make changes to his staff when he saw the Irish lagging in any area. Chip Long, who replaced Sanford as the offensive coordinator, was fired in 2020 and Kelly promoted Tommy Rees from quarterbacks coach to coordinator. Notre Dame is 51-9 since Kelly changed course and made wholesale changes to his staff. Kelly went from on the brink to a coach whose job is safe and secure. Judging by the performance of his offensive line this year, it’s almost a certainty that offensive line coach Jeff Quinn will be replaced.

The situation with Brian Kelly is not dissimilar to the one Dan Mullen currently finds himself in at the University of Florida. Kelly fired defensive coordinator Brian Van Gorder during the 2016 season after the Irish had given up 74 points and 999 yards in consecutive losses to Michigan State and Duke teams that finished that season with a combined 7-17 record. Mullen just relieved Todd Grantham of his coaching duties after a debacle in which a bad South Carolina team ran for 286 yards and hung 40 points on the Gators.

Kelly got Notre Dame back on track by cracking down on discipline issues, bringing in coaches who were better recruiters and putting Balis in charge of resurrecting toughness in the program. Mullen does have discipline issues within the team and he knows it. He also knows that he has to change the way he recruits pronto. Nick Savage is a fine strength and conditioning coordinator but perhaps Mullen needs to give him more leeway to bring back the toughness to the team.

At his Monday press conference, Mullen alluded to the toughness and discipline issues in an offhand manner. At South Carolina, Mullen said, “Saturday we didn’t play with great effort. We didn’t play with great toughness. That’s not acceptable.”

Here is how that translates: The Gators were anything but tough and were worked over by a South Carolina team that played as if the game were its Super Bowl. The Gators didn’t have the toughness or discipline to fight back.

Coaches and observers who have watched the Gators this season have commented on the lack of toughness and discipline, so it’s not a great secret that these issues were at the heart of the 40-17 beating. When you compare the lack of toughness and effort against South Carolina, it makes you wonder how it is for three quarters the Gators stuck it to Alabama. Florida’s offensive line manhandled the Alabama defensive line en route to 258 rushing yards. Since 2009, Alabama has only given up 250 or more rushing yards six times. Once past the first quarter, the Florida defensive line out-physicaled the Alabama O-line. Alabama managed only 91 yards on the ground.

How could Florida play so well against Alabama, which is ranked second in the College Football Playoff poll, and then have a game like South Carolina when the Gators not only couldn’t stop the Gamecocks from running the ball, but couldn’t run on a defense that Texas A&M ran for 290 yards on two weeks earlier?

Inconsistency like that has plenty to do with why Grantham and O-line coach John Hevesy woke up unemployed Monday morning.

“I think Todd’s an excellent, excellent football coach and there’s times that we’ve played great defense,” Mullen said. “We just haven’t done it consistently. We’re one of the top rushing teams in the country … we just haven’t been consistent with John and the offensive line. At this point in the season, that was something that hit me? Do we get through the season and look to make changes after the season or do we just make that move now? If it’s something I think I was going to do at the end of the season – and I think I was pretty set that I was going to make some changes at the end of the year – I thought we might as well do it now and move on so we can go search for who we’re looking to replace.”

There will be more staff changes. That is inevitable. The firings of Grantham and Hevesy in all likelihood resonated like a cannon-shot across the bow of the remaining coaches on the staff. When the head coach fires people with three games to go in the season, it’s a sure sign that everyone remaining is coaching for his future. Mullen fired coaches who had been with him a long time and were his friends. That should tell everyone on the staff there are no sacred cows, that everyone on the staff is replaceable.

Kelly didn’t have an early signing period to deal with in 2016 so there wasn’t nearly the urgency in making changes as there is for Mullen. When the clock flatlines at zero on November 27 when the Gators play Florida State at The Swamp, it can be expected that several current Florida coaches will be cleaning out their offices the next morning.

And, Mullen will be on the phone, either setting up interviews or else hiring people he knows and trusts to come join him in Gainesville. Some people might think there will be a lack of confidence in Mullen which therefore will create shortage of high-profile candidates to join the Florida staff. That idea might make the rounds on the internet and on message boards, but Mullen will have his choice of plenty of qualified candidates.

“This is Florida so there’s a long list of people that want any job they can get at the University of Florida in any aspect,” Mullen said.

The same held true for Brian Kelly at Notre Dame back in 2016. Just as Notre Dame is a national brand, so is the University of Florida. Kelly’s history was and is winning football games. Mullen won, lest we forget, at Mississippi State, where nobody else has come close to matching his success. He’s also won 33 games in a little less than four years at Florida. He was 29-6 before the three-game losing streak at the end of 2020 and the carryover disappointment of 4-5 so far in 2021.

It is indeed Florida. It is the Southeastern Conference. There will be good coaches who want the UF job. The trick will be to find the ones who are the best fit for Florida and who can hit the recruiting trail running. He is already formulating ideas about who he wants to bring in although he did make it a point to emphasize he’s not going to be making any new hires until after the regular season concludes.

“Right now we’re getting ready to play Samford as well,” Mullen said. “You’ve got this week’s game plan. Obviously, there’s a little bit more deal with making sure our players, everybody’s on the same page and understands what we need to do moving forward. You’ve got all the recruiting stuff going on within our program, so when you combine all that stuff, it hasn’t been the last 24 hours of me just going complete job search, looking for candidates that way. But the benefit of being here at Florida is there’s going to be a lot of people that want to come coach for the Florida Gators and be a part of this program.

“… I think what is most important is to get the best coach who can do in recruiting as well as coaching and developing our players. It has to fit what we expect at the University of Florida. We’re going to search hard and get the right people for this program.”

Attrition is part of the college football landscape. Not every place is like Clemson where Dabo Swinney has had very little turnover for the better part of 10 years. Continuity has worked well for Dabo, who is 117-17 since 2012 with two national championships. Turnover is almost expected at Alabama where Nick Saban has had eight different offensive coordinators, five defensive coordinators, six offensive line coaches and six defensive line coaches in 14 years. Nick is 178-24 with six national championships since 2007.

Mullen doesn’t have the track record of championships that Dabo and Nick have, but will have the facilities upgrades that have put Florida behind the better programs in the country within a few short months. That will help enormously with recruiting, but so will hiring the right assistant coaches to step in and get Florida past this 4-8 speed bump that has existed since December of 2020.

Back in 2016 Brian Kelly had to look in the mirror and decide that the issues plaguing the Notre Dame program were of his own doing. He took ownership of the problems, jettisoned some coaches who were hindrances and brought in new blood. The results are there for everyone to see. When Dabo Swinney went down in flames at the 2011 Orange Bowl (70-33 loss to West Virginia), he fired Kevin Steele and brought in Brent Venables to coordinate the defense. Steele was a buddy so it was a painful divorce. Saban has been a bit more cold-blooded about the comings and goings on his staff, but he’s actually thrived in the chaos.

We won’t know for a few weeks how many more changes Dan Mullen feels the need to make to right the Florida ship, but this much we can know for sure: If he brings in the right coaches he can survive this difficult stretch and get the Florida Gators back on a success trajectory like they were on the first 35 games of his tenure at UF.

If Grantham and Hevesy are the only coaches that are dismissed, then it will be very difficult for Mullen to regain the lost momentum. Change is necessary. The first steps, although difficult since Grantham and Hevesy are friends, have been taken. The next steps will be no less painful but necessary if Dan Mullen intends to be the head coach at the University of Florida for any length of time.