Gators head coach Dan Mullen sent shockwaves through social media on Sunday night when reports surfaced that he had fired defensive coordinator Todd Grantham and offensive line coach John Hevesy following UF’s 40-17 thrashing at the hands of South Carolina on Saturday. UF confirmed those reports on Monday morning.
It wasn’t a surprise that Mullen fired them. Grantham’s 2020 defense gave up the most yards and points per game of any Florida defense since at least 1945, and his current group gave up a combined 605 rushing yards and 75 points (not counting two touchdowns by opposing defenses) to struggling LSU and South Carolina teams.
Hevesy’s group has regressed in a big way since their strong start to the year, and some poor recruiting has left the position with very little depth.
However, the timing of their firings seemed to catch most people off guard. By his own admission, Mullen is an extremely loyal person, so much so that it can even be considered one of his faults.
He’d also dodged several questions this year about whether he was open to making in-season moves and talked about his desire to evaluate everything at the end of the season. Firing coaches with three games left in the regular season seemed out of character for him.
On Monday, Mullen provided a rather blunt explanation for why he decided to fire Grantham and Hevesy now. Following the South Carolina game, he reached the conclusion that he was going to fire them after the season. Then he decided that it was better and fairer for everybody involved to go ahead and make the move now instead of leaving everybody in the dark for three weeks. Plus, he can get a jumpstart on finding their replacements this way.
“Every team shows up, and their goal is to win a championship,” Mullen said. “Very few do, right? If you go to the national championship, it would be one that gets to do it. If you go to the Power Five conferences, there’s five in the country. So, it’s hard to judge success by that completely. That’s obviously our goal, but one of the ways you look and say ‘Is it a successful season?’ is ‘Are you a better team at the end of the year than you were at the beginning of the year?’
“We’re not better than we were earlier in the year. In fact, we’re worse than we were earlier in the year. At that point, I looked, and I said we’ve got make some changes with what we’re doing and where we’re at.”
Mullen said that their latest loss, which dropped them to 4-5 overall and 2-5 in the SEC, was different than their other losses this season. They didn’t just lose that game because of one or two plays that went against them. They didn’t play hard, which resulted in a nationally televised, 3 ½-hour-long butt-kicking. That ended up being the final straw for Grantham and Hevesy.
“If you’ve looked at us throughout the year, we’ve had some tough losses,” Mullen said. “What I mean by tough losses is we go out and play, we do some really good things and make some catastrophic mistakes that caused us to lose some games. That wasn’t the case on Saturday. We played bad. And so, it’s very different analyzing that game to the others. When you go back and reflect, and you’re looking at the positives, you’re looking at the negatives, OK, ‘This was really good. This was poor.’ It was hard to take much good out of Saturday’s game.
“I could take good out of just about all the other games, and I could point, like it or not, ‘This is the reason we lost the game.’ Saturday’s was we didn’t play well. We didn’t play with great effort. We didn’t play with great toughness. That’s not acceptable.”
Mullen admitted that parting with them was tough for him on a personal level. He’d worked with Hevesy since they were on Urban Meyer’s Bowling Green staff in 2001. Grantham had been his defensive coordinator since his final season at Mississippi State. He considers each of them his friend, so it was tough for him to deliver the news.
In the end, though, Mullen is paid by the University Athletic Association to do what he thinks is best for the football program. The professional side of things outweighed the personal side.
“I have a lot of respect for them,” he said. “Both excellent football coaches. My responsibility as the head coach is to do what’s best, what I feel is best for the Florida Gators, and that comes above it all. It was obviously a really tough decision to make. It was something that was weighing on me. It was something that I was looking and saying, ‘Hey, I’m probably going to make changes at the end of the season,’ and I thought for the health of the program, for the health of everybody, you know you’re going to do it, let’s make that move now and get us headed in the direction we’re going into in the future.”
Shortly after the news broke on Sunday night, one of the common theories floating out there on social media and message boards was that Mullen either fired them on his own to appease a livid fan base that wants him fired or he was pressured into firing them by athletic director Scott Stricklin.
Given Mullen’s previous comments about wanting to evaluate everything at the end of the season and the intense scrutiny he is facing, it’s not a bad theory.
However, Mullen said that this decision was his alone.
“Our administration here does an unbelievable job, the support they give us,” he said. “I have a great working relationship with Scott, and you look at what we’re doing right now, the work we’re putting in. Obviously, we would love for everything to be extremely accelerated, where we have a facility like most teams in the country. We build up, and we get kind of caught up where everybody is in college football. Scott’s tirelessly working at that, the support they give for that.
“[The staff changes are] certainly something I discussed with him and we had discussions about. So, I think he was certainly involved in it, but it certainly wasn’t any pressure. The decision was mine.”
Of course, firing Grantham and Hevesy was only the beginning of Mullen’s plan to rebuild the Gators. Now he’s got to hire two outstanding coaches to replace them. For his sake and the sake of the Gators’ immediate success, he needs to hit home runs with both hires.
Mullen said that he’s started doing research and compiling a list of possible hires. Because he still has to game plan, recruit and coach in games, he’s currently not able to devote 24 hours a day to the coaching search like he would in the offseason. He does plan to take advantage of some of the down time that they have later in the week on Thursday and Friday to start contacting coaches. He doesn’t anticipate filling the openings until after the season, however.
“I think what is most important is to get the best coach in recruiting as well as coaching and developing our players,” he said. “It has to fit what we expect at the University of Florida. We’re going to search hard and get the right people for this program.
“I’m going to go get somebody that’s going to fit on our staff, that’s going to get our players to play at an extremely high level, that’s going to be a great fit for our staff, for our players and for the program and for the University of Florida.”
Some fans and media have questioned whether top-notch assistant coaches will be interested in coaching at Florida right now due to all of the uncertainty. Whether it’s true or not remains to be seen, but the perception is that Mullen will be fired if the Gators don’t show significant improvement in 2022, assuming that he makes it to next season. Why would a coach be willing to move his family to Gainesville if he thinks that there’s a decent chance that the entire staff will be fired if they have another bad season?
Mullen doesn’t think that coaching for the Gators will be a tough sell. This is still one of the most prestigious programs in the country despite its current state of affairs. He also thinks that staying loyal to Grantham and Hevesy for as long as he did makes him an attractive boss to work for.
“There’s a long list of people that want any job they can get at the University of Florida in any aspect,” he said.
“I think anyone that comes to work for me will know that … most people that work for me will tell you that I’m a good person to work for, and I’m a very loyal person. People enjoy working for me. Probably why people have stuck around a long time too.”
Gators fans were rightfully outraged by what they saw in Columbia on Saturday night. The good news is that Mullen recognizes that they have major issues and is trying to make the necessary improvements. That doesn’t guarantee success, but Mullen doesn’t appear to have thrown in the towel on this program like some people have accused him of.
“I’ll always tell you guys ‘It’s never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems,’” Mullen said. “I could have said that about this season up until Saturday, to be perfectly honest with you. I think I really could have. Maybe we look over the last couple years, and everybody’s like ‘Wow, maybe we weren’t quite as good as we thought.’ We found a way to [win] before this weekend. I’m disappointed. I apologize. That’s not what the Gator Nation expects.
“I looked at something. Before this last Saturday, in the previous seven one-score games, we’re 1-6. In the ones before that, we were 6-1. Was it that great, or was it we’re just finding a way to polish things off and win, and then, all of a sudden, we’re making mistakes that cost us? So, I don’t know that it’s maybe to the extremes. But I think that’s the challenge for me, and that’s what I’m excited about. I’m excited to make sure we get this program where it needs to be.”