It’s hard to place Dan Mullen in the pantheon of coaches. He will always be closely associated with one of the all-time greats in Urban Meyer, but he is not a clone of his old boss. His offense and Meyer’s drifted apart immediately after they separated, to the point that watching Meyer’s last Ohio State squad in 2018 gave you no deja vu to watching Mullen’s first one at Florida.
Mullen spent nine years doing about as best as can be done in Starkville, which will get you acclaim in the way that Bill Snyder did, but not a spot at the top. “Oh, he did a wonderful job, considering” is as high as that praise gets.
He’s stabilized Florida to hovering around in the second half of the top ten. It’s an improvement on three of the other five coaches to have held court in Gainesville in the 21st Century, but it’s below the accomplishments of the other two.
Near but not the pinnacle of school history is the sort of thing that gets appreciated more in hindsight than in the contemporary day. Mack Brown’s run of nine consecutive 10+ win seasons at Texas is a paradise compared to what has come after, even if he only won the conference twice and watched his chief rival win most of the other league crowns. If Mullen can keep winning at a high level and maybe snag one national title with just the right quarterback as Brown did, he’ll have done all right even if the grousing would never stop in the interim.
One reason why Mullen often gets overlooked in the national discussion, besides his empty trophy case as a head coach, is his personality. He has a reputation of, let’s call it being an acquired taste.
Here, I don’t speak of his players. Some love him, some I expect end up loathing him, and most would probably end up in the middle. So it is with anyone who deals with 110 direct reports per year.
But it’s notable that Mullen did spend nine years in Starkville. It wasn’t for lack of trying to get out. He took a number of interviews, including Miami (FL) twice according to Bruce Feldman. His second time interviewing for the Hurricanes’ job came after they fired Al Golden midway through the 2015 season. Mullen was coming off of the two big Dak Prescott years, and after doing that at Mississippi State, it was high time to matriculate out of there. And so he tried.
He didn’t get the job. It went to UM alum Mark Richt instead, who was coming off his own Mack Brown-like tenure at Georgia with a lot of high success but too few peaks. Mullen’s resume was iron clad at the time, but the story is, as was the case every time he tried to get out of Starkvegas, that he blew the interview.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two places ready to hire him after 2017 were a Tennessee program that had kicked the tires on a number of other coaches before settling on him and a Florida program with Mullen’s old AD Scott Stricklin. In the latter case, Stricklin was the assistant AD at Mississippi State when Mullen was hired and had a long working relationship with the coach. He knew what to expect.
Mullen’s deal is that he can be abrasive, and he’s certainly not the most polished communicator. Andrew talks all the time of in-person recruiting working best for him, and that tracks with the second point. When the overtly churchy Hugh Freeze was starting to get on a roll in recruiting at Ole Miss, Mullen’s social media feeds started putting out religious messages. Mullen is a man of faith, but it’s personal to him. The messages were cringey and felt forced, and I don’t think they ever got him anything.
Mullen was largely silent this offseason as social issues took over the sporting world, allowing official UF and UAA communications to do most of the public talking for him even as he was doing the right thing in talking and listening to players internally. He came under some criticism for it, but it was probably the best choice given the last ten days or so.
The Mullen who’s not terribly huggable came out with his stumping for a full Swamp. He doubled down on it before walking it back like a scolded child apologizing to a sibling. Then a week to the day from his call for 90,000 to gather in one place, he announced that he tested positive for COVID-19.
He was not wrong on Monday when he defended his program’s record on health after UF announced five positives. They had been doing well. They had been keeping the number of positives very low. All it took for an outbreak was for a couple of players to not report symptoms, and the close quarters required for travel did the rest. Florida could’ve been in a place to garner sympathy given how the outbreak happened; 18 to 22-year-old males aren’t known for their pristine judgment.
Instead, UF is a laughingstock with Mullen the clown at the center because of his comments. The details don’t matter anymore. He called for a full stadium seven months after it became manifestly obvious that crowds are a bad idea in many cases. He defended his program’s precautions one day before it got shut down for an outbreak. And then he himself came down with it.
I don’t know how long this episode will tail Mullen. He’s not the first and was never going to be the last college football head coach to make such an announcement. Purdue’s Jeff Brohm revealed he has COVID-19 just yesterday, in fact.
It is emblematic of Mullen’s shortcomings as a public official, though. He is great when he’s immersed in football and only football. Booster club events always draw high reviews, and in-person recruiting is his strong suit. Get him out of that context to any degree and the Mullen who needed more than half a decade past the point of proving his worth to get out of Mississippi appears.
The 2020 season is so screwy that I don’t think many of the on-field results should be part of coaches’ legacies. With a debacle of a week off the field, Mullen may have cemented one aspect of this year in his final story. Ultimately I think Florida fans will forgive him — if they haven’t already, and if they think he needs forgiveness at all — but this kind of thing is why Mullen’s place nationally is never quite as good as his fans think it should be.