The new Team Talent Composite for 2021 is not out yet as of this writing, but Florida will probably rate highly in it.
The team was seventh last year, and five of the eight Gators to go in the NFL Draft — including early selections Karadius Toney and Kyle Trask — were 3-star players. Undrafted free agent Trevon Grimes is the biggest loss in terms of recruiting ranking, but he’s more than offset by Demarkcus Bowman transferring in. Plus, the 2017 class has largely gone by now, and the new 2021 signing class collectively rates higher than it. We’ll see if teams full of super seniors can pass up UF on sheer volume alone, but I strongly suspect the Gators will be in the top ten again.
It matters because there are clear patterns that emerge when you match up Dan Mullen’s teams against their opponents in terms of team talent. The TTC goes back to 2015, so I looked at his teams from that season through 2020 to see how they fared based on team talent differential alone. Recruiting ratings aren’t everything, but they do mean a lot.
To classify the matchups, I made tiers based on the points. If the point differential was more than 160, which is about how far the No. 1 overall team is than the tenth or eleventh in a given year, I called Mullen a heavy favorite or underdog depending on which team was on top. If the difference was less than 30 either way, it was a tossup. I didn’t include any games against FCS teams, none of which ever beat a Mullen team anyway.
Heavy Favorite: 16-3 (.842), Scoring Margin +15.6
Every one of these games from the Mississippi State years came against G5 opponents.
Due to UF playing multiple FCS teams in both 2018 and 2019, Miami (FL) appearing on the schedule in ’19, and the lack of non-conference games in 2020, only one G5 opponent from the Florida era is here (2018 Colorado State). There are a number of games against the lower-rated SEC recruiters like Vandy, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ole Miss plus Orange Bowl opponent Virginia.
Only one of the three losses was from the MSU era, that being the season-opening 21-20 loss to South Alabama in 2016. A combination of Mullen playing the wrong quarterback, two missed field goals, and the first signs that the new DC Peter Sirmon was a bad hire conspired to spring the upset. The other two came from Mullen’s transitional year at Florida in the losses to Kentucky and Missouri. Both of those were similarly marked by quarterback struggles and defensive follies.
Favorite: 10-1 (.909), Scoring Margin +15.7
Here is when Mullen teams were solidly ahead by talent ratings but not as overwhelmingly so. The games consist of mostly contests against lower-tier SEC schools with a 2016-17 home-and-home against BYU and a 2015 bowl engagement with NC State mixed in.
The only loss was in overtime at BYU in that 2016 down year, which is in the running for Mullen’s worst team other than his 2009 transitional one at State. Not only did it feature easily Mullen’s biggest defensive coordinator mistake — yes, really, Grantham critics — but also the offense had some periodic issues from losing Dak Prescott.
Let’s stop here and combine the two Favorite categories: 26-4 (.867), scoring margin of +15.6. When Mullen has a noticeable talent edge, he generally comes out ahead by a couple of scores. The losses came in a cyclical down season and a transitional year. The latter is a real effect; Urban Meyer’s only loss at UF to a team that finished with fewer than nine wins came in 2005 (to Steve Spurrier’s eventual 7-5 South Carolina).
Tossups: 10-5 (.667), Scoring Margin +7.3
Mullen’s record noticeably dips once the talent evens up. Even so, our old nemesis of the 2016 Mississippi State Bulldog team appears. Two of these losses, 40-38 to Kentucky and 58-42 to Arkansas, came in that star-crossed year. They were much more the fault of Sirmon than were the two previously documented losses in which State failed to score more than 21 points.
The other three losses also came in a year of bad defense: 2020. The Gators gave up an average of 44.3 points per game in dropping talent tossup games to Texas A&M, LSU, and Oklahoma. The game against the Sooners, in hindsight, was never going to be close with all the opt-outs leading the coaching staff to treat it like a scrimmage. The other two were exceedingly winnable had the defense managed to get (or ahem, not throw away, ahem) just one more stop against the Aggies and Tigers.
If you just want to set aside the pandemic year, well, that also tosses out a win over Tennessee. Like FSU, who has yet to appear, UT has been greatly underperforming pretty healthy talent ratings for years now. Anyway, minus 2020 the record moves to 9-2 (.818), which looks a lot better. Unfortunately, those games do still count.
Underdog: 7-8 (.467), Scoring Margin +1.7
Take away talent advantage or parity, and Mullen’s chances of winning go more to a coin flip’s chance.
Half of the losses were from the Starkville days: to Ole Miss and Texas A&M in 2015, to Gus Malzahn’s last top ten team at Auburn in 2017, and to the Rebels again in Mullen’s last game in maroon. The Florida era ones are the two losses to Georgia, the 2019 LSU loss, and the 2020 SEC Championship Game.
Not all of the wins here were necessarily impressive. Two were over Willie Taggart FSU teams, and two were over Kevin Sumlin’s final two teams in 2016-17. Those staffs were on their way to being fired for squandering talent. Another came over Hugh Freeze’s final Ole Miss team in 2016, which went 5-7. Mullen’s 2018 win over LSU and 2020 win over Georgia are the only ones really worth bragging about.
Heavy Underdog: 2-7 (.222), Scoring Margin -11.0
All of these games came at Mississippi State, as Mullen’s Florida teams have never had a single-game talent gap bigger than the 128.03 deficit in the 2018 Cocktail Party.
The losses were to the teams you’d expect: three to Alabama, two to LSU, and one each to Auburn (2016) and Georgia (2017). One of the wins was an ugly low-scoring win over a volatile 2015 Auburn team. The other was a 30-point trucking of LSU in 2017, a game that probably remains the single most impressive win Mullen has as a head coach.
All of these games, weirdly, were either one-score contests (record: 1-3) or decided by 24 points or more (record: 1-4).
Summary
At risk of slicing the data too thin, let’s see what the most flattering picture is that you can paint with this data without completely losing contact with reasonability.
When not living through a truly disastrous DC hire (2016), a transitional year (2018), or a pandemic (2020), Dan Mullen is a perfect 20-0 against FBS competition when talent is at least a tossup by my definitions above. Sounds pretty great, right?
However as an underdog in those same seasons, he’s 2-6 with wins only over a team about to fire its coach (’17 A&M) or that already had (’19 FSU). As a heavy underdog, he’s 2-4 with two close and two blowout losses. If you’re no longer satisfied with the sample we picked here, Mullen is 5-2 as an underdog in those three even-numbered seasons. Be careful how you do your slicing and dicing of the numbers.
Regardless, talent clearly matters. Mullen has a reputation for being one of the best game planners for a reason, but even he struggles to win consistently when faced with a noticeable talent deficit. He’ll reliably knock off some teetering talent squanderers for you, but victories against healthy programs with healthy talent advantages are hard to find.
To his credit, Mullen has noticeably upgraded the talent in Gainesville while also squeezing everything he could get from the generally lower-rated McElwain holdovers. The Gators leapt from the high 700s in the McElwain years to the 830s in Mullen’s first two seasons, and then into the 870s last year. I think they’ll be around that level this year too.
The good news is that if he can sustain that level, only four teams will be beyond the level of tossup. The bad news is that two of them are in the SEC: Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Clemson. If he can get up to around 885-890, then Clemson can be within the tossup range too. The other three have been in the 960s and higher since 2018, Alabama for longer than that, and there’s no sign they’re slowing down.
Mullen’s next step is to prove the pandemic year really was just as screwy as, say, a transitional year and not a sign of cracks in the foundation. Next after that is to keep clawing up the talent ratings and really develop some killer game plans for late October and early December.