It’s not a good sign necessarily that Dan Mullen fired two members of his coaching staff after this year. I could be, if it’s a signal that he’s willing to let members of his closely-knit staff go in order to improve, but it does raise some questions both specific and general.
Torrian Gray, for one, had only worked for Mullen for two years. A sizable chunk of the staff is guys who’ve been with him for much longer than that. Sending the newbie packing is less of a big deal than it would be to send one of his longtime lieutenants packing.
It also shows that when push comes to shove, he’s not going to prioritize recruiting. Though Gray had a reputation for player development from his past work, the way he stood out most on the UF staff was in his recruiting prowess.
The corners looked worse across the board in 2020 versus 2019, so there was an actual development issue with his position group. How much was him and how much was the overall scheme I can’t say, but it is unusual for a coach to get fired for the first time 21 years into his career when he’s doing the same job he’s always had.
Ron English is a bit of a different story. He first joined up with Mullen at Mississippi State in 2017 and followed him to Gainesville. Four years is more than two, and when given an obvious opening to make a change with his ascension to the Florida job, Mullen recruited English to come with him. In other words, it was harder to some degree to fire English than Gray.
It was also a more clear-cut situation. English does not have a history of landing big-time recruits as Gray does, and the safeties never got significantly better under his watch.
If you go back to the 2018 depth charts, you see four names: Brad Stewart, Donovan Stiner, Shawn Davis, and Jeawon Taylor. Taylor graduated after 2019 and was replaced by Trey Dean, and Stewart played both safety and star this year. Stiner and Davis remained throughout when healthy.
Davis noticeably improved from 2018 to 2019, but he didn’t continue to progress in 2020. Stewart had the most high-end potential of the group but never fulfilled it. Stiner and Taylor both got to points where fans were begging to never see them on the field again. Dean at least showed real promise by the end of this year. Rashad Torrence did at times too, but with how little offseason practice there was, it’s hard to know how to divide credit between coaching and the ability he had coming into UF.
For having the same core players for that long, those are some pretty thin results. Maybe it wasn’t entirely English’s fault and those guys had something about them that he couldn’t fix, but three years of marginal results isn’t good enough in the SEC. You’re either getting better or falling behind.
I haven’t even mentioned the star position, in part because I don’t know whether Gray or English coached it. I assume Gray did because it’s technically the nickel corner spot, but it does some safety-like things so I am not 100% sure on it.
Regardless, it’s been lost since Chauncey Gardner-Johnson left for the NFL. It’s somewhat ironic because CGJ’s career was lost until he found his place at star.
The reports late in 2018 and into the 2019 offseason made it pretty clear that the plan was to have John Huggins take over the role. For those who don’t remember, he was a signee in Mullen’s transitional 2018 class. UF listed him with good size at 6’1″ and 206 pounds on the roster that year. He didn’t do a whole lot as a true freshman considering he finished the year with the same number of tackles as Lucas Krull and Tommy Townsend, but the practice buzz about him got very loud.
Huggins was notable in his absence in 2019 fall camp, and Florida ended up dismissing him due to repeated bad behavior. UF never had a backup plan that fully worked.
The first move was to put Dean there. It wasn’t bad as far as ideas go. Star is something of a hybrid corner/safety role. Dean was a safety in high school and played decently enough as an emergency fill-in corner as a true freshman. It went poorly, however, because he didn’t progress much past “decently enough for a true freshman” as a cover guy (sound familiar?). Marco Wilson did better as a late-season replacement, but he’s too small to do much of the run support stuff that star needs. Amari Burney, who was a backup at star in ’18, ended up filling in some too despite being bulked up to play linebacker in the offseason.
Stewart was supposed to take over at star this year but, as per usual for him, he missed the first two games to undisclosed reasons. Wilson reprised his role at star for a time, and true freshman Tre’Vez Johnson played some there too. Stewart never was a good fit, as (somehow) the SEC Championship Game was the only contest where he really played well there. Johnson plays fast with an aggressive streak that is far too scarce among the Gator defenses of the past couple of years, but it was clear that he didn’t totally know what he was doing out there. Which is understandable for a true freshman with little offseason practice.
The upshot was Stewart and Wilson splitting time between star and their other positions, perhaps diluting their effectiveness at both. Had Huggins not earned a dismissal, the star position could’ve been set. Instead, UF has been flailing in trying to find someone to staff it as well as Gardner-Johnson did. Maybe Johnson will use the experience of this year and, we should hope, a spring practice session to raise the level of play there.
So again, things have not been working out in the secondary except for the play of Gardner-Johnson and C.J. Henderson, and the latter showed himself to be a future superstar as a freshman under Jim McElwain’s staff. I know a lot of Gator fans would’ve like to keep Gray, hoping that maybe a defensive coordinator change that now appears unlikely would allow him to teach a different technique. For what it’s worth, it’s being reported that Gray was fired. That indicates he would’ve liked to come back next year if allowed.
Ultimately, the root problem is that we kept seeing the same players in the backfield even as they weren’t progressing. Most of them came from the last staff, too. Dean is the only Mullen recruit to get a starter’s amount of playing time.
Huggins and WR/DB prospect Justin Watkins from 2018 were dismissed. Randy Russell from the same class was medically disqualified the month he enrolled, and Burney, originally a safety prospect, moved up to linebacker. Chris Steele from 2019 transferred, and looking ahead, Chester Kimbrough from ’19 is in the portal out of frustration with playing time.
A combination of attrition, slow player development, and Mullen’s longstanding preference for seniority and experience meant that no young players ever rose up to definitively take spots away from those same old veteran players. Which meant they got the same old results over and over.
The expectations and standards are higher in Gainesville than they were in Starkville. I can’t prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I think a case could be made that Mullen hasn’t entirely adjusted to that reality. Firing obviously underperforming assistants is a start, but it’s not sufficient. If Mullen is going to live up to The Gator Standard, everyone else around him is going to need to as well.
English and Gray weren’t the only ones not meeting the standard, so canning them won’t fix everything. We’ll see how long it takes for Mullen to make more moves, but I absolutely don’t expect him to do everything that’d be required to get there. He’ll have to prove he can win big in spite of that.