Since the Gators escaped the Swamp with a 70-52 win over Samford on Saturday, much has been said and written about coach Dan Mullen.
Most of it – if not all of it – has been extremely negative. Several journalists have written articles explaining why they believe it would be best for the Gators to fire Mullen. Others have taken a less aggressive stance and merely pointed out why Mullen’s days at Florida might be numbered.
Those types of articles and social media rants are to be expected when you give up more points in a half (42) than any other half in school history to an FCS team with a losing record.
Mullen, though, isn’t concerned about trying to change the narrative about him and the program in their final two games of the regular season, starting Saturday at Missouri. The way he looks at it, there’s nothing he can do that can change people’s opinions. People are going to think whatever they want to think. The only opinions that matter to him are those that belong to people within the program and himself.
“The narrative is we won,” Mullen said. “We won on Saturday. We scored 70 points. It depends on what you want to look at as your narrative. We had every right to pack it in. We’re losing and then came back and dominated the second half of the game. We had a young guy, [Emory Jones], set the all-time record in the history of Florida football. I don’t know that there’s a bigger narrative.”
A reporter then followed up that answer by reminding Mullen that all of those accomplishments came against a team that the Gators were expected to beat by a million points.
“That’s your narrative,” he said. “Your narrative is your narrative. One of [you] guys has an article to write, you write, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what happens. I’ve already wrote the story.’ That’s your narrative as a professional journalist that you’ve already written a story no matter what the outcome is. My narrative as coach is we won a football game, we had a guy set an all-time school record – that’s a pretty big deal – put our backs against the wall, we came out, battled and outscored a team [35]-10 in the second half.
“The narrative’s your narrative. Our narrative is we won the game. I was with the team this morning, [and] the guys are fired up. We celebrated, had a great time in the locker room. We’ve got a great week of practice ahead of us, and guys are excited to play football again. That’s my narrative. You can do whatever you want to do.”
The way this season has unfolded has led many to believe that Mullen will be coaching for his job in the final two games of the regular season. Fan support for Mullen seems to be miniscule and recruiting has taken a nosedive. So, losing to Missouri and Florida State and missing out on a bowl game could be the last straw.
Mullen said that he doesn’t feel any more pressure this week than he has any other week during his coaching career, and he thinks he has a strong relationship with athletic director Scott Stricklin.
“This is my 13th year as a coach in the SEC,” he said. “365 days a year for all 13 years, you’re under a certain pressure to perform. To me, this week’s no different than last week or the week before or five years before or 10 years ago. You’re always expected to perform in this league.
“[Stricklin] and I do have a great working relationship and understanding of identifying issues, problems, and what are the solutions to try and fix them in whatever it is that we’re both working on together. I think we’ve always had that. It’s not a very ‘I do my thing, and you do your thing.’ We’ve always worked very well together in looking at the big picture of things.”
Gators won’t apologize for celebrating Samford win
Shortly after the Gators finished off their win over Samford, some players posted videos of them celebrating the win in the locker room on social media. Mullen was seen dancing in some of the videos. Loud music could be heard blaring out of the locker room while the media waited for the postgame press conference to begin.
Those clips rubbed some fans the wrong way. To them, celebrating after a game in which you gave up the most points ever by an SEC team to an FCS school was a sign of a culture problem. At Florida, the standard should be much higher than being in a dogfight with Samford for 3 ½ quarters.
The Gators, though, don’t regret celebrating the win in the slightest. They work extremely hard year-round for 12 opportunities to win and show off their skills to fans. They spend way more time preparing for games than they actually do playing games. So, whenever they win a game, they’re going to enjoy it, even if there are plenty of areas that need improvement.
“I’ve never won a game that wasn’t worth celebrating, and I’ve never celebrated a loss,” Mullen said. “I’ve never celebrated what you guys call moral victories. I’ve never celebrated a moral victory. I’ve never danced or celebrated or cheered a loss, but I will never not celebrate a victory and enjoy a victory, OK?
“If we win 3-2 this week, we’ll be dancing in that locker room, OK? We will be dancing in that locker room, and, if we win 70-52, we’ll be dancing in that locker room and celebrating. We work way too hard. The players work way too hard. The game of football is something special, and I could maybe understand the people that aren’t competitors or have never played football would look at things possibly a certain way. But anybody that’s ever played, you’re never not going to celebrate a victory.
“If you’ve never experienced winning a football game as part of a team, you’re missing out on one of life’s great experiences of being in a locker room with a bunch of guys that you just won a game as a football team. That’s one of life’s great experiences, and to sit there and say, ‘Boy, should you be happy about that?’ That’s one of life’s great experiences. It’s a shame not everybody’s gotten to experience it.”
Defensive lineman Zachary Carter said that people who haven’t played football don’t understand how significant every win is, and they’re not going to let the criticism they received deter them from celebrating again this weekend at Missouri if they win.
“I just know that a lot of people on the outside, they don’t really understand what goes into this,” Carter said. “Like, yeah, they see the result on Saturday. They don’t see what goes into it throughout the week, throughout the offseason. Man, we’re working hard like every day to try to win these games. So, when we win, of course we’re going to be happy and celebrate, especially the way this season has been going for us.
“It just felt good to get back in the win column. So, we’re just focused on our locker room. We don’t listen to the outside noise; we just focus on what we have going on.”
Jones’ career day
Jones’ play would’ve been the biggest takeaway from the Samford game if not for the horrendous first half on defense.
He completed 28 of 34 passes for 464 yards (tied for the fourth-most in a game in program history) and six touchdowns (tied for the second-most). He also rushed for 84 yards and a touchdown. His 550 total yards of offense broke Tim Tebow’s record for most total yards in a game.
“I wouldn’t say it really sunk in, honestly, still,” Jones said. “I still think I could have did more in the game. Made some good decisions, made some good passes. I still feel like there was a lot that I could have done more.
“I feel good about how I’m playing, but there’s a lot of improvement to be made. We still have a couple games left, so that’s all I’ll keep trying to do. Us as a team, as an offense, we still have to try to go out here, have a great week of practice, go out there and perform on Saturdays.”
Mullen said that game was big for Jones’ confidence. With the way Samford was scoring almost every time that they got the ball, Jones needed to play almost perfectly and match them drive-for-drive for the Gators to pull off the comeback win, and he did exactly that.
“They were making special plays,” Mullen said. “And so, it kind of put some pressure on us to continue to go perform and score. We made mistakes and other stuff defensively, too. I think it was so huge for Emory to just sit up there and just consistently perform time after time after time. To go and set the top performance for a quarterback in the history of Florida football, that is a pretty special deal, right? There’s a lot of great players and a lot of football played around here. When you sit atop the record book as a quarterback here at Florida, that’s a special deal.”
Mullen said that Jones played with the type of resiliency and focus that he’s looking for from the defense. After the game, he made comments about how the defensive players need to stop waiting for somebody else to make a big play and just focus on doing their jobs on every snap. If they do that, the end result will be good.
Jones provided a visual of what that looks like. He didn’t get discouraged by how the defense was performing or blame them for anything. He just kept playing to the best of his abilities, and it worked out for him and the team.
“I certainly think that that’s one of the things that I’m talking about,” Mullen said. “Instead of, ‘Hey defense, you need to pick it up,’ ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m going to go execute at a high level. We’re going to go score points on offense, and that will encourage and elevate the level of play in the defense eventually.’ And I think there is a lot to that within the team of ‘Guys, stop worrying about somebody else [doing] something, and you just go perform and make plays. And when you do that, you will elevate everybody around you.’”
Gators still fighting
Whenever a team loses three games in a row and doesn’t play well on defense against an FCS team, one of the first things that some fans and media do is assume that the players have given up on the season and no longer have that burning desire to win.
The Gators certainly have way more talent than South Carolina and Samford, so the idea of players throwing in the towel serves as a convenient and somewhat lazy explanation for what went wrong in those games.
And in some cases, maybe the players really do quit on their coaches and on each other.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case with the Gators this year. There were some very upset defensive players during that first half, and some of the leaders led an intense halftime conversation in the locker room. An apathetic team doesn’t have that conversation.
“At halftime, guys were a little frustrated,” Carter said. “Obviously, we were down at halftime to Samford, which is unacceptable. Guys were a little frustrated. I saw some guys getting in other people’s faces. I felt like, if it needs to go there, it needs to go there. That’s what leadership is about. Sometimes, you just can’t be nice. Sometimes, you’ve got to be in somebody’s face, maybe call some people out. It helped.
“I tried to keep my cool, but, when it’s time to speak up, I speak up. I kind of got a little bit out of character with it.”
As Mullen pointed out, the second half tells you that this team’s mindset is still in a good place. If they were going to mail it in, when they were trailing 42-28 to Samford in the second quarter would’ve been the time to do it. Instead, they had that fiery halftime meeting and then outscored the Bulldogs 35-10 in the second half.
“I talked to our guys about this: ‘From everything that’s gone on for our season and how we’ve been and how it’s gone and you’re losing 42-28, you could have packed it in, very easily packed it in,’” Mullen said. “Probably a lot of people in the world would do that. It was just too much, just ‘I’m done.’
“But the resolve our guys showed to just buckle down and really dominate from that point forward was pretty impressive of the guys, and that doesn’t happen without really good leadership – not just … the coaches’ leadership – leadership from within and the accountability to themselves and their accountability to their teammates as a team.”
Jones said that this team will continue to play for each other until the very end.
“We were down 42-28, but, like I said, it showed how much we care about each other,” Jones said. “All the things we’ve been through this season, and it showed that we all care about each other, that we still have fight. We’ll go to war with each other every time. That’s what we did, and that’s what it showed.”
The Gators could very well lose their final two games of the season and finish with a 5-7 record, but, if that does happen, it probably won’t be because the players stopped caring.