Where Dan Mullen stands among the best college football head coaches

The offseason is always a time to take a step back and assess the bigger picture. One facet of that big picture is where the best coaches rank against each other.

Nick Saban stands alone not only now but in the history of college football. In the present and among active college coaches, Dabo Swinney is a clear second with six consecutive top-four finishes and two national titles. Other top candidates include national title winners Jimbo Fisher and Ed Orgeron, annual playoff participants Lincoln Riley and Ryan Day, plus others who frequently have finished in the top ten in recent seasons like Brian Kelly, Kirby Smart, and James Franklin.

Where Dan Mullen stands is in part a matter of perspective. The Athletic‘s Stewart Mandel and Bruce Feldman are good counterpoints here. Mandel weights recent performance more heavily, and he has Mullen ninth following last year. Feldman takes a longer view, and he has Mullen 16th.

Mullen is harder to evaluate than most because of his nearly decade-long tenure at Mississippi State. He interviewed for plenty of other jobs while there, so he didn’t stay that long because of how outstanding the ice cream in Starkville supposedly is. Mullen’s PR fiascoes of the past year, where he seemed incapable of knowing what the diplomatic thing to say or do was, have shed some light on why it took so long for him to jump elsewhere.

Regardless of all the reasons for it, his long residence there breaks the normal heuristics people use for grading coaches. When a guy wants a bigger job but has a hard time getting one, it generally means he’s not that good.

Mullen is the best postwar coach in MSU’s history, though, and he will always be the coach who was No. 1 in the first-ever College Football Playoff rankings. He produced plenty of NFL players along the way to boot. Yet, only three of his nine teams finished ranked at all, and he was a combined 4-23 against Alabama, Auburn, and LSU.

Among today’s critical darlings, the situation is most reminiscent of that of Iowa State’s Matt Campbell. Like Mullen, he had a sub-.500 first season before starting a consistent bowl streak in his second. He had his big breakthrough last year in Year 5 instead of Year 6 like Mullen did, but Mullen did have a ranked finish before said breakthrough whereas Campbell did not. Their paths are projected to diverge more significantly since Campbell has nearly everyone coming back from last year’s No. 9 Fiesta Bowl-winning team.

Is that enough to put someone like Campbell ahead of Mullen? Obviously the head Cyclone will have to come through on the big expectations this year in order to make a more definitive case.

Mississippi State is not the entire story for Mullen, of course. He had a pair of top ten finishes in his first two years at Florida and was a shoe throw away from finishing the 2020 regular season in the top ten as well.

UF is a much different place than MSU is, so we must use a different kind of scale. Back-to-back top ten finishes with a top-15 finish, all three with New Year’s Six bowls, is what UF fans expect. They do expect to compete for championships every so often too, and UF hasn’t been as close as, say, Smart’s second team was.

But Mullen has measurably improved team talent despite the periodic anxiety about his recruiting, as Florida went from the mid-teens in the Team Talent Composite in the McElwain years to seventh last year. Transfers helped some with that, of course, and they are not the same thing as recruiting.

One thing that frequently gets said for Mullen is that he gets the most from the talent he has. It’s more true for him than it has been for fellow blue blood programs like FSU, Miami, Texas, USC, and Michigan of late. However since the Team Talent Composite’s inception in 2015, he’s finished right where those rankings would predict him to be as often as not.

He’s had two strong finishes: 16th in SP+ in 2015 with the 28th-ranked talent team, and 7th in SP+ in 2019 with the 15th-ranked talent team. He had one bad finish in 2016 when he made a disastrous (and quickly remedied) defensive coordinator hire: 56th in SP+ with the 28th-ranked talent team. In the other three seasons, his SP+ rank was within three spots of his talent rank: 28th/25th in 2017, 13th/12th in 2018, and 6th/7th in 2020.

For perspective, Jim McElwain’s first two teams were also right on given their talent ratings. They were 15th/18th in talent and SP+ 2015 and 16th/15th in 2016. That’s why it’s an important nod in Mullen’s favor that he’s improved the talent, though he’s not within shouting distance of the annual top four in team talent of Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, and Clemson. He beat the socks of UGA and pushed Bama last year, but asking for more than that with the current talent disparity could be a bit much.

Mullen put together a championship-caliber offense last year despite still having a decent number of McElwain holdovers he didn’t recruit. The 2018 Mississippi State defense, which Mullen and staff almost entirely built even as they didn’t coach it, finished No. 1 in the country in SP+ defense. Mullen is capable of building top-tier units on both sides of the ball; as always, the trick is doing it at the same time.

The 2021 season will play an outsized role in how Mullen is perceived, and not just because of recency bias. There are a few holdovers like Zachary Carter and Jeremiah Moon, but the roster is mostly players Mullen signed or landed as transfers. It’s his team, for better or worse.

The finish to last year also hurt his reputation more than I thought it would. The bowl performance in particular was transparently a developmental affair, easy for anyone who viewed the game to see. Perhaps I overestimated how many national pundits would actually watch it. The three-game losing streak on top of those aforementioned PR problems really soured Mullen in some corners. The 2021 team will have the question “can he bounce back?” hovering over it the whole way.

I tend to agree with those who put Mullen in the second half of the top ten. Rankings are entirely subjective and I go back and forth on what I think is important, but Mullen is one of the best in the game right now. He is durably so in a way that some more CEO-like coaches are not because he personally oversees offense and quarterback development. And despite the slide at the end, 2020 showed Mullen to be exceptionally flexible as he produced his most sophisticated passing attack to date without much of his customary quarterback run game to back it up.

I don’t know whether he’ll get those title-worthy units at the same time, but he has shown that he can do each of them. That’s more than a lot of head coaches can say, including fast risers like Campbell or ones who are consistently higher than him like Riley. He made UF better in a faster timeline than Franklin improved Penn State, and also maybe Kelly at Notre Dame too depending on how good you think Kelly’s third-year team that got trucked by Bama in the national title game was.

It’s been long enough that I don’t expect Mullen to reach the level his old mentor Urban Meyer did, but I can see room for him to move up the rankings yet. He’s not a finished product — and may never be, as he’s proven adaptable over time — and those who continue to grow and change are the ones who stay near the top once they get there.