With the Gators having lost three consecutive games – including an ugly 40-17 loss to South Carolina last week – Gators fans have turned against head coach Dan Mullen in a major way. If Florida football was a democracy and there was an election held this week to recall him, Mullen probably would not be the head coach anymore.
Mullen doesn’t blame you for feeling that way. He understands what the expectations are at Florida. At a school that invests millions of dollars per year into the football program, has millions of passionate fans and has access to some of the best athletes and facilities in the country, regular championship contention is the standard. Being 4-5 and needing to win two of their final three games just to make a bowl game is unacceptable.
On Monday, Mullen publicly accepted responsibility for this disastrous season and vowed to fix the program’s various issues.
“I’m the head coach, so I bear all of it,” Mullen said. “It’s on my shoulders. I’m the one that’s responsible for this program. I’m the one that’s responsible for this team and how we’ve got to perform. That’s your job here as the head coach is to take on that responsibility. My job is to make sure we go perform, that this team plays to the Gator Standard, which we’re not doing right now. It’s my responsibility to find a way to fix that.”
Mullen said that he believes that athletic director Scott Stricklin is still on board with his long-term plans for the program, and he also has confidence in his ability to make the 2021 season an outlier and not the new normal.
“[From] my talks with Scott, he is pretty confident that we’re going to get this fixed,” he said. “Now, I can’t speak for him on that deal, but, within his confidence, it wasn’t about this year and next year. It was a long-term picture of where we want this program to be in many years to come.
“I think there’s a lot of problems. I’m pretty confident in myself, and I’ve won a lot of football games as a head coach, won championships here. Everybody has problems. The key is to having solutions. Everybody in the world will tell you every problem they have, and it’s real easy.”
One of the biggest reasons that Mullen’s fan support has vanished is because of the perception that his players have given up on him and don’t believe in him anymore.
Mullen doesn’t think that’s the case. He thought that they practiced well last week, and he was shocked by how poorly they played in the game. If he truly has lost the locker room, wouldn’t that show up every day and not just on game day?
“I wish I could sit up here and tell you, you know what, we had a terrible week of practice,” he said. “We came out, and we played poorly. I wish I could tell you there is apathy in the locker room. Our guys were excited to play, ready to play and wanted to go win. We were fired up. We had a great week of practice. I thought we had a pretty decent plan going in. Obviously not.
“I thought the energy was fine. I thought it was really good. I thought our effort was good. I thought our mental approach to the game was good. One of the things and the biggest challenge for us right now is we’ve got to figure out how the Monday to Friday team shows up [on] Saturday. They’re not matched.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Is it a confidence thing? Is it something that as soon as something goes wrong, everybody’s kind of looking around [and going] ‘What’s the issue? Who’s going to make the play? Oh no, what’s happening to us?’ So, I think we’ll see at practice today. I certainly don’t want to come out and ‘Let’s have a bad week of practice and play really well.’ I want to have a great week of practice and play really well.”
Mullen knows that the current state of the program is intolerable and that he’s going to have to work extremely hard and make some changes this offseason to be the head coach of the Gators beyond next season, assuming that he survives this year.
He’s going to have to hire at least two new assistant coaches, get their recruiting out of the doldrums, figure out the future at quarterback and get much tougher on both lines of scrimmage.
In the short term, however, Mullen and the Gators just need to win their final three games, starting with Saturday’s matchup with Samford. Winning won’t fix their problems, but it would provide for a much better environment in which to fix their problems over the offseason.
“The status quo is not going to be acceptable to us,” Mullen said. “[I] talked to the team this morning about that. I had to explain what status quo meant for some of the guys. There’s a lot of disappointment with where we’re at in this season. So, what we’re looking for is how are we going to change that? And we have the opportunity on Saturday.
“Our complete focus .. has to be about this Saturday, not where we’re going to be in two weeks or three weeks or four weeks or next season or what happened last week. None of that’s relevant. All that’s irrelevant, and all we can control is how we go perform this Saturday. And, honestly, we’ve got to block everything out but that performance.”