Transcript: Dan Mullen On Florida Gators Playoff Hopes, a Heisman and Staying Focused Vs. Vanderbilt
Florida Gators Head Coach Dan Mullen met with local media on Monday. He discussed the playoff hopes for his No. 6 Gators, the Heisman chances for quarterback Kyle Trask and how to keep the team focused facing a winless Vanderbilt Commodores team.
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“Injury update. [Tight end Kyle] Pitts will not be available this week for us. [Receiver] Trent Whittemore had a broken rib and a punctured lung in the game Saturday, so he won’t be available for us this week. [Linebacker] James Houston is questionable. We’ll see how the week progresses with him. That’s about it. Everybody else should be good to go at this time.”
You said last week that to become a great team you have to get better every week. Looks like you guys are on that trajectory right now. What’s the next hurdle?
“It is. You just look at this week, this week’s game, it’s the same thing. I talked to the guys this week. Not only does our focus have to be on Vandy and preparation within the scheme and the game plan and everything we’re doing with Vandy. We can also focus on ourselves and how we’re getting better in different ways. You look at last week’s game, defensively, we can’t give up the big, explosive plays like we gave up. But you don’t give up those, you play pretty good defense. The last time we played an ultra-fast football team, I don’t think we got lined up as fast and lined up the right way in time. They were beating us back to the ball. That didn’t happen last Saturday. We were there, we just gave up some explosive plays. Offensively, the offense efficiency, seeing how teams are playing us, how they’re reacting to us. We went into Saturday’s game, played a whole lot of dime defense, dropped a lot of guys into coverage, how we react to that and execute against those type of teams in situations. So much there’s a lot on us. And then, create depth. It’s a long season, as guys go down. You’re playing 10 SEC games. You have to always have that next-man-up mentality. We’ve got to create depth. If I’m an older guy, I’ve got the leadership to help create depth. If I’m a younger guy, I’ve got to prepare for when my number is called to go execute and make plays. There’s a lot of little things we do. We do have to focus on ourselves, as well as making sure we’re ready for the game against Vanderbilt in every aspect in the scheme. That’s how you get better. Last week’s game, it was a lot, we came off an emotional win, let’s make sure we continue that motivation. We haven’t arrived yet. This week’s game is kind of, ‘OK, we showed we can get over an emotional game and come back and respond good, but are we focused enough on our personal improvement from one week to the next?’
The College Football Playoff is the ultimate goal, but that fourth spot has been interesting off and one over the years. Do style points matter? Are you guys really looking to put the hammer down? “That’s probably more of a question for [Athletic Director] Scott [Stricklin]* than me because I’m not in the room. I don’t know if style points matter. I’m not into that. I’m into how are we making our team better. I certainly don’t want to be somebody that. … we’re up five touchdowns and we’re in a two-minute situation to go up six touchdowns, or I’m faking a punt up four scores. You know what, hey, we scored to go up 28 in the fourth quarter and we’re going to go for two instead of one. That’s not who I am as a coach, that’s not the program we want to be, that’s not what I think the game of football is about. It devalues some of the game. It’s not really what, in my mind, what it stands for. So, we’re going to worry about are we getting better and are we improving more than just me trying to sit there and say, ‘OK, can I try to run the score up on somebody so I look better for a committee?’ That’s not what I’m all about. It’s not really what, in my mind, what it stands for. So we’re going to worry about are we getting better, and are we improving more than me just trying to sit there and say, ‘OK, can I try to run the score up on somebody so I look better for a committee vote?’ That’s not what I’m all about.”
*Scott Stricklin serves on the College Football Playoff Committee
Individual awards tied to team success. How much of you saying that is the team is focused on the team, and how much is the fact that the SEC will get plenty of exposure anyway?
“I think this: I think there is a great reality to it, when you go back and look. You know what I mean? We had a great loss with Paul Hornung passing away this year. I think he was the last person to win the Heisman Trophy on a losing team. … Only one. You start looking at it. You look over the last couple of years, and a lot of what’s that done — is it always the best player? Is it kind of the best player on the best team combination, in a lot of these awards that go out? I don’t know. I’ve always kind of been focused on that. If we can focus on team success, you’re going to get a lot more individual accolades when your team does really well than if your team does average, no matter how well you perform. You’re going to get a lot more personal accolades when the team does better. And so if you just focus on that aspect of it, you’re going to have those opportunities to get those individual accolades.”
Tebow won it without you all being super duper awesome. That an outlier?
“Yea, I think it was a little bit. Now granted, it wasn’t like we had a terrible season. I think we won nine games that year, still. You know, I think that year, it was one of those – to be honest with you, I don’t remember. But I also think – he was doing some things that hadn’t been done before. I don’t know who his competition was that year, who finished second or third. Maybe you can look at that. But he also picked things. I think we went up to South Carolina, if I remember right. You’re getting close to the end of the season, and he put up a seven-touchdown performance. It was kind of on the edge of where everybody was getting ready for crunch time towards the Heisman, and he went up and put a seven-touchdown performance in that game. I think that really got people excited. And he was putting up, I think, 30-20 numbers, right? That year. I don’t know. I don’t remember all of it. But I do think he put up some numbers that were hard to ignore on a team that was still pretty good.”
Darren McFadden and Colt Brennan were 2-3…
“Yeah. I don’t think Darren – I don’t think they were on a championship team, either.”
McFadden was runner-up, though.
“I think maybe it was a little bit of an outlier year on the teams that played and won that year.”
Playing in front of fewer than 1,000 people this weekend, need to bring your own juice—
“Yeah we addressed that already. We had thought it was going to be even less than that. I think they came out today and said players families could go. We had a meeting last night with all the players families, a zoom call, our parent meeting to say, hey, the information we had last night was parents couldn’t even come to the game, it was that restrictive. Now they’re going to let some parents come to games. That’s a big benefit for the players and their families, just to have their families come. We’ll be able to do that. It’s something we’ve already talked about and addressed. Early morning kick, an 11 am kickoff. A very limited crowd. It’s kind of been a different year that way. We’ve gotta come out focused on our performance and focused on how we play.”
Game two years ago up there, losing at halftime, is that when the team started buying in? “Could be. I’d have to go back and look at each game that season.” Well you lost the next two, so maybe the theory is wrong. “Yeah. I thought more South Carolina, when we came back to win the South Carolina game. Would have been that year, if I’m thinking back at it. I thought that gave us a belief of how to win a little bit but maybe turned the corner against South Carolina a couple weeks later. We’ve talked about that. I’ve talked about that with our team. The last time we went to Vanderbilt we were down 21-3 in that game and when you talk about our preparation, our performance, if you want to be great we have to play at an extremely high level if we want to have a great season. You can’t come out and start slow. No matter what the atmosphere, what is going on, you gotta come out and play at a certain level and play to our standard of what we’re doing. You can’t come out and start slow like we did two years ago up there. We addressed that today and we’ll see. You get a feel once you get through the week of practice how everybody’s doing.”
You always say Trask gets the ball where it needs to go, how hard is that to do? “I don’t think it’s easy for quarterbacks to do. I try to say that about all our good quarterbacks because that means you’re doing a good job. You understand what the gameplan is. for us, which is we’re going to design things but I’m not going to force the ball to specific receivers. We’ll have ‘get it to’ plays to get them the ball but we’re going to call things and then we’re going to react to what the defense gives you. The great thing for him, and a big part of the quarterback position is how fast you can do that. How fast can you process that information because there’s a laundry list of things you’re doing and there’s times you have about 2.4 seconds to do all of those different things and you’ve gotta process things a little quicker. I think he’s done a really good job of understanding the offense, understanding how the defense is going to play, understanding how he’s going to attack that type of defense and processing it all really fast to get through all the different reads and get the ball to where it needs to go.”
Is best part of Trask’s game the mental aspect compared to physical aspect?
“No, I mean, he’s not the most dynamic runner out there, you know. The physical part of the game, he is an extremely accurate passer, he’s got unbelievable size and strength in the pocket. He is very athletic within the pocket in slight movements that I think get very overlooked. People look at an athletic quarterback and it’s got to be, ‘hey, how many people can he miss running the ball.’ But his athleticism has shown in his pocket movements, his slides and movement around the pocket, and he’s very accurate. I think if you’re accurate and if you’re smart and a good processor of information, you are going to be a really, really good quarterback.”
**Conversation about Tebow losing to Ingram and Bradford in Heisman races**
“Yeah, they were both teams that won, right? Well, [inaudible] to win national championship and we stopped that one. I will say this, and I know he [Tebow] probably doesn’t admit it, but that’s always a good question for him. There was some motivation there that he didn’t win it and the quarterback on the other team did in that 2008 game. I don’t know if Tim admits to that, but having somebody that spends quite a bit of time with him leading into that stuff, I think there was a little bit of extra drive inside of him.”
What goes into developing a quarterback, not just Trask but in general?
“I’ve got to whisper when I do this, right. Whisper or something like that. No, there’s a lot to be honest with you. One, you look for certain type of traits in recruiting of guys that have great mental and physical toughness. Guys that have great leadership capabilities, guys that can process information, guys that are intelligent, then you get into their physical abilities of throwing and running the football. You do that, and then you spend your time making sure they understand all the important things. The first thing we always teach all the quarterbacks is you better understand protection, that’s self-preservation right there. You better know every protection, how we are going to protect you, where are your hots, where are your sites, how to check protections, are going to be. And then you are getting into and understanding how to read every type of defense. What are defensive indicators that are out there. And then how do you want to attack every defense. A lot of people understand – I’ll give you this one, on what to do – a lot of people just coach guys what to do. Well, that’s not going to develop a quarterback. That may get them to a limited extent. If you’re just coaching what to do and then you kind of coach them a little bit on how to do it, but it’s the why we do it is really how you develop a quarterback. They need to understand exactly why we’re doing what we’re doing and if when they do that, then they have a grasp of how the offense is supposed to work and what we’re trying to accomplish within the play. And then you set up your practice schedule and installation of everything you do around quarterback development. And then, I think Brian does an unbelievable job of coaching them. I coach them well and, I don’t know, I think we do a pretty good job of coaching those guys. Within each game plan, within the big picture of the offense with understanding of how to attack defenses, and then how to use a specific game plan to attack defenses, then we set up practice to maximize their development. That’s it like in 30 seconds. I mean, I can’t give to you all. We’ll get together when I step down, Kassidy, and you can write the book. Dan Mullen on quarterback play.”
What does it say about Kemore Gamble with his blocking?
“He did, and we had 10 different guys have catches and he didn’t have one, which is kind of shocking. He played more plays than Zip and Zip had the two touchdowns. If you know us, that’s not on purpose. That’s unintentional. They were just rotating in, and as we rolled guys through, Zip’s series came up and he got the touchdown catches. The second one, they were both on the field for. That’s where the read took you, to go to Zip. I do think with our guys, you now, we had 10 different guys with catches. I would have loved to have him get one so we could said we had 11. But it shows his maturity, his development and our guys’ understanding of the offense, ‘Hey, I’m in there to do my role, do my job to the best of my ability.’ And if that’s making touchdown catches, make touchdown catches. If it’s to block, block, because at the end of the year, you’ll roll around and see everybody had the opportunity to have success and have stats. When you get to the end of the year, if you just kind of worry about doing the best you can be and what’s asked of you.”
Tim Brewster’s role in developing those guys?
“I think he’s done a really good job with those guys. I think you see it with Gamble and Zipperer coming into the game and those guys and how they’ve performed. It’s one thing in helping Kyle. Kyle’s a special athlete, and some of the stuff Kyle does, you’re like, ‘Wow, that.’ I’m not going to bash Brew, but he didn’t really coach him to leap over two guys and make this ridiculous catch. That’s God-given ability right there. When you watch the other guys come in and how they perform, you show what a good job he’s done in preparing the depth and the quality of depth of everybody in that room.”
On Kyle Trask understanding the offense:
“Well, I think there’s a lot. I think he does … there’s a of different ways. We’ll call multiple plays and he’s got to check into one. Check the play to whatever the best play’s going to be when we call multiple plays. He has, obviously, protection checks and ID checks within the run game. He’ll have some automatic kills, where if they give us certain looks, he’ll kill and just change a play to something else completely altogether. So he has the freedom to do a lot of that stuff out there on the field. He has freedom. I guess he can change the play to whatever he wanted to change it to at anytime in the course of the game. All I’m going to ask him is why he did it. If he doesn’t have a good reason, I’ll tell him don’t do it again. If he has a good reason, then I’ll tell him good idea. You have the freedom to go do that. It also gets to the why you want to do what you want to do. There will be times on the sideline you’ll see him getting up and checking to do things and Brian’s like, ‘I don’t know what he’s doing.’ We’ll figure out what he’s doing. And sometimes it’s for show, you know. Sometimes he’s doing all that stuff and it really doesn’t mean anything. So, I think he just shows his maturity and what he can handle. And, you know, and we put a lot on the quarterbacks, you know, within what we do. And so, but he, but he does—you know, I mean our question, you know, my question constantly to those guys are, 'Can you handle what we're putting on you and if something's too much let us know.' And then you have to have maturity to come to us and say 'hey, yeah, this, I don't, I don't have this', you know, and it's a big difference between 'I don't have it,' on Monday or Tuesday and 'I don't have it,' on Thursday and Friday. I mean there's stuff Monday and Tuesday, that he won't have yet and then I'll come back and check by Thursday and Friday, 'I'm good, I got it.’ You know, and then we monitor that and that's, you know, if there's something they're not comfortable with, we just take it out of the game plan."
Your thoughts real quick on Todd Grantham, we've talked about this a lot over the year. He has a different kind of defense obviously maybe a little more gambling style. His goal is to knockout the quarterback and yet somehow some people don't seem to grasp what he's doing. I don't know why. Once again, can you reiterate the value of—
“Yea, we have a very aggressive style defense and don't mistake aggressive style defense for we're just gonna blitz all over the place. We have an aggressive attacking style defense. I think we lead the SEC in sacks or maybe we're probably up there. We're going to get after quarterbacks, make life difficult for them. And, you know, and I mean I think Todd and the staff, you know, do an excellent job of making adjustments, of changing things during the course of the game of even this year, you know like I said early in the year, we had a lot of newer faces in the, in going into the season. You know, and you look at, you know, midway through last season, we were okay offensively and then we realized hey you know we've got these great receivers, we've got our quarterback can get them the ball, we can protect up front. We're gonna go a little bit more of a pass offense. You know, we kind of grew into who we are, I think we're finding that defensively and we've played a lot better. You know now that I think they have a good grasp of what our defensive and who we are, this year. And what we're gonna do that way. So you know I think Todd does a great job of, of having answers to questions that offenses are going to present. Yeah, if you look at the game last weekend. We gave up you know the with the ones in the game we gave up 21 points. With the twos, gave up 14 in the last, you know, 10 minutes of the game. You know, but but, and that's great. We're going to coach those guys really hard because we don't know, you could be a play away from being on the field, you gotta be ready to go. You know, I think that and also you have to look at, I think there’s—when we go into games we don't have, you know, everything's not completely separate at every game. You know it's not like 'hey offense you just do your thing. Defense you just do your thing.' There's a lot of discussion back and forth on how we need to get the game to go play out. You know, and you know that that was a—we do that so I mean I think people get—not always look at every aspect of how the game is playing out, and what our plan was going into the game."
Would you mind speaking to the challenges of getting a team ready for an0-6 team. How do you sell them on the potential dangers of that if there are any.
"Yeah, well I mean there are because they're, you know, an SEC team. They’re coming up. They’ve been, they've been, you see them continue to improve. You know, a team that, you know, I mean, almost beat Texas A&M to start off the year, a seven point game last week. Outgained Mississippi State, should probably, you know, have won that game. And the last time we went there we were down 21-3 so there’s a lot of different things you could point out within this team and the talent within this team and how they play hard. You have do that. So again, you have that aspect number one and then you have the aspect, number two is, if we want to be a great team we have to get better. So not only you know, is that focus on your opponent, that focus is on yourself as well. If not I guess I'll put on a cheerleading outfit and get on the sidelines and start trying to motivate us that way. But we only get 10 games this year, so you better be motivated for those opportunities and to get on the field and to go play and go make plays. Shouldn't need any more motivation than that."
EVER FELT A TEAM WAS NOT TAKING AN OPPONENT SERIOUSLY ENOUGH BECAUSE THEY WERE OVERLOOKING THEM?
"Absolutely. Multiple times. It's a tough challenge. It is a tough challenge to do. We've done it and lost games because of it."
YOU CAN SENSE THAT DURING THE WEEK?
"Absolutely. Absolutely. It's our job to make sure that doesn't happen."
WHEN DO YOU KNOW WHEN A QB GETS THE WHY? WHAT SHOWS YOU?
"Well when they can talk football. You know what I mean? You're just watching film, you're game-planning, you're doing different things. 'What do you like here?' Just make sure they see it the way you see it. That they just understand the game of football. Some guys it happens faster than others. But it's, I don't know. You just kind of know. You get that feel. You can see it in their performance, too. It's ever-changing. It's not like one day they don't have it, the next day they've got it. It doesn't work that way. You just see it evolving more and more and more throughout it."
CAN'T FAKE IT, THOUGH?
"Yeah. I mean I could go on campus right now to go over to the physics department and I couldn't fake my way through that. They're not going to be able to fake their way through a quarterback conversation."
FIRST TRUE ROAD TRIP SINCE A&M, WHAT CHANGES? HAVE CONCERNS?
"Absolutely. The Jacksonville one, I think that was a little bit easier. You had a bus ride. You were spread out over, I think we took five or six buses, so we were really spread out. Obviously you have a regular locker room. The visiting locker room there is very similar to a home locker room, so that was different. So since the A&M game, first real road game. We've put a bunch of different things in place, we're looking at different things. Getting on a plane is getting on a plane. We've got to be really smart about how we do it. We try like we did before, we're very defined on where the seating plan is and where everybody is seating on the plane. Making sure everybody has their mask on at all times on the plane. Because some of the guys will fall asleep and take it off or one of those deals. Everyone has their mask on, make sure that is always happening in what we're doing on the plane. I think they're going to limit any sort of food or drinks on the plane to try to limit that as much so that people don't even take their masks off to do that. We're going to change our routine on gameday as it involves the locker room. Unfortunately I've been to Vanderbilt, so I know the visiting locker room situation. We're going to change our entire pregame routine to try to really limit the amount of time that we would ever spend in the locker room.”
SEC schedule rule changes, prepared to switch gears for last-minute foe?
“Like right this second? I look at it this way, LSU we were getting ready to play them and the game was postponed, so we have work in on them, and Kentucky and Tennessee were our first two games of the season, so you had offseason work on them. Could I tell you anything about gameplans right at this moment? No. But I have a notebook full of notes that we could try to turn it over to get prepared to play if we needed to.”
Took until Week 7 with 2008 Gators and 2004 Utes to score 63?
“There you go. I’m ahead of schedule.”
Favorite plays, innovations as an offensive coach, play caller?
“Boy, you know, it’s so cyclical, I would guess for us through the years, really kind of the empty passing game would be something that people would probably look back on and say, wow, they did an awful lot of that when nobody else was doing that stuff. Through the years, that, you’d love to say, hey, all the .. Bowling Green we put in this goal-line offense where we direct-snapped it to the quarterback with no running back in there and two tight ends and three wide receivers, and then that became known as the Wildcat a couple of years later. But that also was run back in the 1920s called the single-wing, too. So I don’t know if you get credit for all of that stuff, but I’m sure throughout different times you look and say, hey, Utah, a lot of people call shovel-option a Utah play. But I think Utah was running it way before we got there, we just kind of did it a lot more. You know, so I don’t know if there’s one type of deal that way, so …
Pulling guards against Arkansas a la Packer Sweep? “Yeah, we pulled. You copy everybody, that’s why it’s hard to say. You’re watching what works, you’re watching other people, you’re always trying to evolve and see how you can be better. I mean, I remember going back, you’re sitting back and we’re running the zone-read stuff. If you go back to ‘08, we’re running zone read and I got Chris Rainey and Jeff Demps who both weight about a buck-80 running between the tackles. They collapse it down, and then 240-pound Tim Tebow runs around the outside. So, what if we just kind of instead of zone-reading this way, we zone-read this way so the quarterback runs inside and those guys run outside. So just a simple innovation on stuff. You’d be shocked how much … and I think Urban did something about it on TV one day … you’d be shocked how much you’re watching practice and you’re doing something and someone makes a mistake and you’re like, ooh, that looks pretty interesting. Boy, like that wasn’t what we were supposed to do, but let’s look at this because that’s interesting and how did that affect the defense and how did it affect what they’re doing? And even though that was a mistake how do we make that the normal way to do something. So we spend a lot of time on that. We’ve tried to be pretty innovative throughout the years. But I love the history of college football that way. Watching all the big games and all that stuff. I do love those sort of things.”
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