Missouri loss was a fitting end to Dan Mullen’s Florida tenure

The Gators’ loss to Missouri was a microcosm of all of Dan Mullen’s failings as Florida’s head coach. It was an appropriate ending to a tenure with highs that were never as high as they should’ve been and lows that were much too low to overcome.

Conservative game management

Despite being an offensive guy, Mullen is very much on the conservative side of the coaching spectrum. He is particularly so on the road.

Mullen chose not to try to go for a score right before halftime against Alabama in what ended up a very close loss. He played things so tightly at Kentucky that the Wildcats needed just one unusual special teams play to make the difference in the game despite the Gators outgaining the Wildcats by more than 150 yards and turnover margin being even.

Then at Missouri, with his job status being very much in doubt, he went hyper conservative again. He punted on 4th & Inches. Well into the second half and deep in Tiger territory, he kicked a short field goal on 4th & 2 despite a ton of evidence that his defense actually showed up to play for the first time since Jacksonville. He played for overtime despite only needing about 40-45 yards to have a real shot at a game-winning field goal.

That’s the kind of game management you do when you’re the head coach at Mississippi State looking to steal a win that maybe you’re not supposed to get. It’s not what you do when you’re the head coach at Florida and playing a Kentucky or Missouri team that is supposed to be at a distinct athletic disadvantage.

Talent and development

According to the 247 Sports Team Talent Composite, Florida has the seventh-most talented roster in the country. Missouri has the 46th. I’ll grant that the Team Talent Composite’s measurements are a bit short circuited by UF having some 5-stars who either transferred in part because they don’t play like 5-stars (Brenton Cox, Justin Shorter) or who are buried on the depth chart (Lorenzo Lingard, Demarkcus Bowman).

But even accounting for that, did Florida look that much more talented than Missouri did?

UF has some athletes who pop off the screen in a way that no one on Mizzou’s roster does. The raw materials are there to a degree. They have not been refined and developed well in too many places, however. Offensive line, linebacker, and safety especially stand out here.

Four years into his regime, Florida’s head coach should have things rolling on the trail and set in terms of development. A Missouri team in the second year of a new coach who replaced a fired coach should not be able to see a path to winning. Yet Eli Drinkwitz not only won, but he was so confident he could win that he arranged a postgame stunt that depended on victory.

UF is on the way to having the kind of small and lightly regarded recruiting class that generally only happens in transitional years in Gainesville. The program might as well move on to avoid having two transitional-level classes in a row for the second time in five years.

Quarterbacks

Emory Jones played the whole way despite the offense struggling to finish drives. Finishing drives has been an issue for the Jones-led offense much of the season.

Mullen never went to Anthony Richardson because, as we learned after the game, the backup had some sort of ill-defined injury issue during the week. No one knew this, of course, because Mullen treats injury news like nuclear codes.

Regardless, injuries have twice before forced Mullen’s hand at making the change he should’ve, with Dak Prescott taking over for Tyler Russell at Mississippi State and Kyle Trask for Feleipe Franks at Florida. This year the injury luck went the other way, forcing him to keep playing the lower-ceiling player instead of the more talented one.

Jones didn’t have a bad game necessarily, and he’s not a bad quarterback. He’s not much more than an average one, though, while Richardson’s performance against LSU showed him to be much closer to being a complete player behind center. Questionable handling of quarterbacks will ironically go on Mullen’s coaching tombstone in Gainesville despite his being good at actual player development at the position.

Missing the big picture

Mullen said after the game that he was concerned about making changes to make the one more play per game necessary to win close games. That statement misses the point so much you can’t even see the point from there.

After defeating Kentucky 28-27 in 2017, Jim McElwain was 9-1 in close games in his tenure at Florida. Sounds good, right?

Problem was, that included things like beating FAU in overtime or, well, beating a less-talented Kentucky because they forgot to cover a receiver on two different occasions in the same game. Mac was 3-1 in games that were tossups or when UF was an underdog and 6-0 in games that shouldn’t have been close in the first place. His close game luck turned suddenly against Texas A&M and LSU, and his tenure ended shortly thereafter.

Mullen could’ve used an extra play or two in his two close losses to Alabama, or to Texas A&M last year. But should he have been in close contests with Kentucky in 2019 or 2021? No. Or severely shorthanded LSU teams two years in a row? Nope. Or Missouri or, for most of the way, Samford this year? Not a chance.

Mullen made a lot of decisions in his UF tenure that were defensible in the moment but not in the bigger picture. Add them all up, and they don’t amount to a championship-caliber program.

Nick Saban once talked about the illusion of choice, something he got from the late Trevor Moawad. It’s a common belief that you have a lot of choice in life. In fact, you do.

However if you want to be the best, you don’t actually have a lot of choice. To quote the Nicktator, “[T]he fact of the matter is, is if you want to be good, you really don’t have a lot of choices, because it takes what it takes. You have to do what you have to do to be successful. So you have to make choices and decisions to have the discipline and focus to the process of what you need to do to accomplish your goals.”

You might think you have the choice to play conservative when you don’t have to, trying to eke out a win by the slimmest of margins because any win’s a win. You might think you have a choice to keep people you really like on your staff even when they don’t produce on the recruiting trail or when their on-field units underperform. You might think you have a choice to heavily favor experience and seniority, even when younger players are more promising, if also more volatile.

But you don’t actually have those choices. Not really, if you want to win championships. There’s no choice at all. Being the best takes more than that. It takes what it takes, and what it takes is more than what Mullen put into the job.