FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In a conference room at the Renaissance Hotel Virginia head football coach Bronco Mendenhall was asked what an Orange Bowl win would mean to his team and the university.
“The University of Virginia has one 10-win season in 130 years of football,” Mendenhall deadpanned before leaning back in his chair, showing that he was done answering the question.
The Orange Bowl isn’t a playoff game this year but it’s a big deal, obviously to Virginia as they try to accomplish something that has only been done once in the history of their football program, but also for the Florida Gators.
Dan Mullen took over a football program that went 4-7 the season before he was hired and had missed a bowl game in two of three previous five seasons. The Gators were a mess, fallen from national prominence to middle tier in the SEC. It looked like a long rebuild and now, 24 months in the Florida Gators are in their second consecutive New Year’s Six bowl game and have a chance to win 11 games this season.
Mullen spent the 2019 offseason preaching that it’s easier to go from four wins to 10 than it would be to go from 10 wins to 11. That doesn’t jive with conventional wisdom, but he kept preaching it to his team and it stuck.
“I think it’s our mentality, our focus. I feel like when we are focused 100 percent and our mentality is there nobody can mess with us. To go from 10 wins to 11 wins is a huge step,” defensive tackle Kyree Campbell said. “Most people might think that’s easy, but to get that extra win is hard. So that’s what we’re hoping to get on Monday.”
The Gators’ turnaround is still going on. Changing the culture and mindset is hard but it’s something Mullen has shown an innate ability in doing. He took perennial SEC bottom-feeder Mississippi State to No. 1 in the country in 2014. Mullen creates a culture where you either buy-in or you ship out. These Gators have bought in.
“I think it’s the way we start the season, meaning that we have to develop competitive toughness, and you’ve got to be all in,” Todd Grantham said. “So I think that we’re all creatures of habit, and if you develop those habitual traits and you have that mindset that I’m going to finish, well, then, as you go through the season, it’s like anything, every week I’ve got to finish, I’ve got to compete. And then once you get to the end of the year, you’ve been doing it for 12 weeks. Now you have a reward.”
This game is a reward and the team has had fun all week. They’ve eating at a Brazilian steak house, go to Dave and Busters and the beach but they’re also practicing. They want desperately to beat Virginia and don’t seem to know that they’re a two-touchdown favorite and they’re certainly not overlooking Virginia.
That’s part of it, part of what Mullen’s culture-building does. The Gators are having fun but they’re balancing fun and the kind of hard work and preparation that has them on the precipice of their 21st win in the last two years.
“When we started with this team last January, we talked about how hard you have to work, and whatever we did the year before, that wasn’t enough. If you did the same, you could expect maybe to win 10 games, but that’s about it. You have no opportunity to win more if we didn’t desperately work every day. To be a much better football team in every aspect of the program, in everything that we do, how we prepare in the off-season, how we train in the off-season, how we prepare during the season, how we perform as a team, how we come together as a team.”
But the work of a head football coach is never done. In a little, more than 24 hours the Gators’ 2019 season will be done and Mullen is already preparing for that.
I mean, we’ll start that whole process again in January a couple of weeks from now.”