Every time there has been a wave of conference realignment, you don’t have to wait long for someone to suggest that the SEC should add the Miami Hurricanes. It’s so obvious, the line of thinking goes. They have a great brand, passionate fans, big stars among their former players, and five national titles. They make geographic sense, and they offer the conference’s teams a chance to play in front of south Florida recruits regularly. What’s not to like?
I’ve always had the same answer: the idea of Miami is better than the reality of Miami.
It’s a small private school with a correspondingly small alumni and donor base. The administration has never been committed to football excellence, it just happens from time to time because of how rich the local talent base is. And those conference members who’d be appearing in Miami regularly can already cherry pick players from there. They have no incentive to give the hometown team a boost by letting them sell the SEC logo.
It had been getting harder and harder to find people who think Miami should be in the SEC, what with their zero conference and one division title in nearly two decades in the ACC. Now with Oklahoma and Texas making 16 within the league, those voices may be silent for good. At least until the fundamental structure of college football changes, anyway.
The idea of Dan Mullen as Florida head coach can be compelling if viewed from a certain angle. He was a part of two of the best offenses in program history in 2007 and 2008. He was a part of two national championships in ’06 and and ’08. He developed multiple NFL starting quarterbacks and multiple Heisman finalists with one winner. He got Mississippi State to the No. 1 rank in the polls for about a month.
It all sounds splendid until you remember the other parts of the job.
It’s great to have a head coach who does a good job on the offensive side and with quarterback development over the long haul, even if some years are better than others. The new CEO-style head coaches that are becoming in vogue, as exemplified by Dabo Swinney and seen in recent hires of Shane Beamer at South Carolina and just this week Joey McGuire at Texas Tech, can’t offer that kind of peace of mind.
However there are a lot of other parts to the job. Mullen is fairly hands-off with the defense, which means that side of the ball is highly contingent on the coordinator he hires. Some have panned out well, like Manny Diaz (twice) and Geoff Collins. Others, less so. Carl Torbush and Chris Wilson left after uninspiring stints, while Peter Sirmon and (eventually) Todd Grantham have been fired.
Mullen also isn’t an ace recruiter, so his performance in that phase of the job is also contingent in part on the skill of his assistants. He has had some good recruiters and evaluators over the years, but three of the four assistants he’s fired in his time at UF were underperformers on the trail. There are still others he could let go to improve recruiting performance if he wanted to prioritize that over staff continuity.
Then there’s just general management skills. It didn’t take long after Grantham’s firing for people to start leaking to the media that he was the source of a “toxic environment” in the last year. Some players commented positively about his and John Hevesy’s firing in since-deleted social media posts. The problem there is not that Mullen hasn’t implemented some kind of totalitarian social media ban. Rather, it’s that he was employing people the players disliked so much that a couple posted those kinds of things in public despite the blowback that would likely come their way from inside and outside the program.
Then there’s fan relations. Mullen likes to ask the fans to show up and be loud, but he doesn’t do a whole lot to cultivate excitement around the program. Canned videos from the professional media staff and booster speaking tours are fine, but there has been precious little access to spring or preseason practice sessions for two years running (there was no spring practice in 2020, of course).
Mullen’s Florida has made no attempt to try to make up for the lack of media access that comes from pandemic-related restrictions. I don’t know how much of that is under his control or not; higher-ups at UF might’ve limited his choices. If the latter is true, he certainly didn’t make a stink about it or spend any amount of effort to give the program’s biggest fans the glimpses of the team they crave. It appears from the outside that he doesn’t realize how much fan interest is driven by media access and excitement from the super fans who want detailed practice reports and attend the spring game. And so when things hit a rough patch, he has no equity built up with those influential fans to weather the storm.
It’s possible to write a story where he recovers from where he’s at today. He might find terrific new staff members who are both great recruiters and coaches. They might help salvage the lagging 2022 recruiting class, then an entire offseason as QB1 might help Anthony Richardson blossom as a top quarterback in the conference and country. As long as some key personnel patches are possible to find in the portal, next year’s team could be substantially better.
There’s no guarantee it will last, because Mullen does seem to be about as good as his assistants are. These hypothetical great new hires could easily head out in short order as they move up the coaching ranks, and he could make some missteps in replacing them as he has in the past. That’s part of the reality of Mullen too.
It could be worth it, depending on how high the highs get. No one lasts forever at a school unless they’re in national title contention most every year (Saban) or hit cyclical peaks regularly at a school that knows it can’t win national titles (Ferentz). The usual tenure lengths of UF head coaches since, well, 1906 suggests that getting a good decade out of someone is as good as it gets short of having Steve Spurrier.
Mullen’s been around long enough and had enough highs and lows that we know what the reality of having him is by now. It is variable, and it could easily go either way from here. He could lose to Missouri and/or FSU and get fired, or he could find some great assistants and go on a great run. Stating the latter as a possibility might just be me succumbing to the idea of Mullen again, but it is an attractive idea. Whether reality can ever match it is very much an open question.
The numbers speak for themselves. 8 losses in our last 12 games. The four wins involved teams that would have lost to some of the top high school programs in America. When you have a blockbuster budget, but produce a d rated movie, you won’t be a director much longer. It is as simple as that.