He is who we thought he is.
I don’t know about “we” for sure, since I don’t know what your initial expectations of Dan Mullen were. I followed his time at Mississippi State closer than a lot of Gator fans did, though, because I wrote for a full-SEC blog from 2008-15 and covered either the whole SEC (2016) or Alabama and Florida (2017) for a now-defunct sports site prior to coming to Gator Country.
It was not a boring nine years in Starkville. He unquestionably elevated the program, but he frustrated the heck out of Bulldog fans at times.
Go back to September of 2013. Mississippi State laid a big, ol’ rotten egg in the opener, a 21-3 neutral site loss to an Oklahoma State team just two years removed from nearly going to the 2011 BCS championship game.
The MSU blog in the network I wrote for wrote a soul-searching piece about whether Mullen could make the Bulldogs a true contender and (bonus!) whether Scott Stricklin’s expectations for the program were high enough. It ultimately went easy on Mullen because he was the best coach they’d had in the postwar era, but there was a hint of desperation. Would it ever get better?
It would, because the very next year was when Mullen took State to the No. 1 spot in the polls for a month. That and the year after were the peak, and it crashed hard in 2016 before recovering some in 2017.
Dak Prescott’s terrific play was a big reason why Mississippi State was so much better in 2014-15. His NFL career has proven he was a good one. Yet at the end of September 2013, we have another piece from that same MSU blog pleading for Mullen to play Prescott over a more limited veteran quarterback in Tyler Russell. It was even more of a blatant problem back then because Mullen had yet to figure out how to build an offense for a pocket passer, and Russell could make Kyle Trask look like Jeff Demps.
I riffed on the early September piece, using one of Bill Connelly’s neologisms to compare Mullen’s MSU situation to Minnesota firing Glen Mason. Mason raised the floor of the Gophers’ program but never broke through, and the administration eventually canned him because they thought they could do better. No one consistently has since. MSU was never going to fire Mullen short of scandal or an extreme fall-off, and again, it did get better the next year.
Still, Mullen has figuratively repeated his playing of Russell over Prescott twice now at Florida. He has face-planted in two straight games against LSU. He’s far more conservative than most offensive-minded coaches are outside of former OL coaches. He’s doing a lot of the same things at Florida as he did at State.
He’s arrogant and unapologetic, which play well when you win and terribly when you don’t. He favors veterans longer than he should and doesn’t prioritize recruiting as much as he should. You can get away with the latter with less criticism at MSU since few 17-year-olds want to go to Starkville over literally anywhere else. But several years into a regime at UF, no one is understanding of struggles on the trail anymore.
Mullen’s stubbornness is best seen in both the quarterback sagas and in his retaining Todd Grantham after last year. Again, it was foreseeable that this would be a problem.
In December of 2017 after the news broke that Grantham would follow Mullen to Gainesville, I wrote a piece titled, “For Florida to be title-worthy, Todd Grantham must do best work of his career“. It was my nice way of saying “Florida won’t win a national title with Todd Grantham running the defense”.
I was generally pretty positive on the Mullen hire at the time, but the choice to bring Grantham over made my stomach sink. I knew it’d set back the program for years because Mullen is almost completely unable to admit a mistake or show what he feels like is disloyalty to his favored assistants. There are instances of him making staff changes promptly when need be — he turned over several spots after his first head coaching year in 2009 and fired DC Peter Sirmon after a more disastrous 2016 than Grantham’s 2020 — but the way Mullen effusively praised Grantham made it clear that no pink slip would come soon.
And so it happened: bringing Grantham over from Mississippi State set back the Florida program. Poor defensive play cost the team a chance at a title last year, and it cost them the LSU game this year. Grantham is also nothing special as a recruiter, so some number of better defensive players are on other rosters right now instead of Florida’s.
Plus, Grantham is the sole reason Christian Robinson is on the staff. Robinson is a terrific person and a good recruiter but not a good on-field coach. The linebackers have been liabilities often these last three-plus seasons, but UF couldn’t let Robinson leave for Michigan last winter because it couldn’t afford to lose him as a recruiter because they’d already lost Brian Johnson.
I’m starting to repeat myself from after the Kentucky game, but honestly it’s hard not to. The things that are keeping Mullen from succeeding more in Gainesville are the exact same things that kept him from succeeding more in Starkville. The criticisms that apply to him always come from the same set of persistent issues.
He was able to paper over some of the shortcomings early on with key transfers, but the portal has been more mixed lately. The defensive tackles this year have held up the legacy (and probably surpassed Adam Shuler), and Jadarrius Perkins looks like he might get there next year after a full offseason of practice. Alas, Justin Shorter is no Van Jefferson or Trevon Grimes. Brenton Cox is no Jonathan Greenard. Stewart Reese is merely okay. Jordan Pouncey will never contribute beyond special teams; Lorenzo Lingard and Demarkcus Bowman are buried on the depth chart; and Elijah Blades is already off the team.
I still think Florida can challenge for titles with Mullen at the helm, it just appears that luck will have to force him into doing the right things.
When forced to do something with the defensive staff after the 2020 debacle, he seems to have made a couple of good hires to replace the guys he fired. Anthony Richardson may have forced his way into the starting QB spot as Emory Jones played his way out of it. Grantham’s contract is up at the end of the year, and if Stricklin is paying attention and not on the outs after his obvious mismanagement of the women’s basketball team, he can force Mullen to go find a new DC by not approving a new deal. Robinson might follow his longtime mentor Grantham out the door. And so on.
Depending on a few 50-50 NFL decisions and if they can get another DT or two from the portal, UF should have a title-contending roster next year. It could be another 2013-2014 turnaround where Mullen goes from “will he ever get there?” to his best season yet.
Whether the Gators have a real chance of pulling off that feat will be determined by a lot of things, like if the staff will improve or remain stagnant and whether Richardson sticks around or gets fed up with being jerked around and leaves. I hate to have to say things like that, but that’s where we’re at.
Florida as presently composed can’t win a title without a lot of good luck. Mullen will have to make real changes to become title-worthy, but Mullen is the same guy now he was at Mississippi State. He’s frustrating Gator fans by doing the same things that frustrated Bulldog fans. Either he adapts, or his tenure is over in the next two or three years.