There was a time early in the Third Saturday game where Tennessee was up 14-7 on Alabama and I wondered how volcanic the anger would be among Florida fans if the Volunteers actually lucked their way into a win. UT was clearly not good enough to outright take the game from the Tide, but it seemed conceivable for a short time that Bama might blunder their way into a loss.
Order returned and Nick Saban’s bunch smoked Big Orange from the second quarter on, but just imagine for a second that we lived in one of the 3% of universes in which Tennessee won. Josh Heupel inherited a much worse situation than Dan Mullen did, and he also is less well pedigreed. He won a national title as Bob Stoops’s quarterback in 2000, but a bit over a decade later Stoops fired him from the Sooners’ offensive coordinator gig. It takes a lot of struggles for that kind of thing to happen.
It’d be a real knife to the heart after how close Florida has been to beating Alabama in their last two tries if that guy at that program had pulled it off. It’s not great seeing Jimbo do it either, considering he began at A&M the same year Mullen did at UF, but he’s a past national title winner. Heupel’s departure wasn’t even mourned by UCF fans, as the Knights had slid every year since Scott Frost left.
At this point, it seems like Florida fans have little to do but look outside the program for comparisons. They kind of had to this past week since it was an open date, but when you’re unhappy with what you have, it’s hard not to keep an eye out for what you might want instead.
Had Tennessee pulled off the shocker, that would’ve been a real flashpoint. Ole Miss taking care of LSU with relative ease was salt in the wounds, though, especially with the Tigers’ top two backs rushing for a combined 102 yards on 27 carries (3.78 YPC).
The thing is, this past weekend provided confirmation that unless you have Nick Saban running your program, it’s not going to be great every single week. Lincoln Riley is one of the few head coaches who gets put above Mullen in the pecking order of offensive minds, but his team got blanked in the first half against an awful Kansas team. Clemson had been on Bama’s level results-wise for a time, but the Tigers now sport the same 4-3 overall record the Gators do.
Or look at some of the guys being thrown out as candidates for the USC and LSU jobs. Luke Fickell’s Cincinnati needed some late-game heroics to stave off a mediocre-at-best Navy. James Franklin lost to a terrible Illinois after scoring 10 points in regulation and coming up empty in six of the seven rapid-fire overtime periods. Mario Cristobal almost blew it in a close win over an overmatched UCLA. Billy Napier’s UL-Lafayette only beat Butch Jones’s horrible Arkansas State team by one point.
That’s not to suggest that actually, Mullen is living up to The Gator Standard and you just don’t understand his true brilliance. Far from it. Nor am I saying that putting up with at least four losses two years in a row — and five is on the table for 2021 between Georgia and the bowl game — because UF should be better than that.
It’s just really, really hard to find someone who will be a good steward of the program over the long haul.
I’ve thought a lot this fall about how strange it is that so many coaches see a pop of improvements in their first year or two or three. Often there will be a decline after that as they get their guys into the program, and they get fired once the trajectory gets bad enough. Then, the next guy will come in and win with the players the last guy hand-picked but couldn’t actually win with. And then the cycle will repeat.
Mullen was at Mississippi State long enough that he went through multiple up and down cycles, as it’s the kind of place where just making bowls earns a lot of patience. Florida is not such a place. I am convinced that Mullen is not in any kind of trouble this winter, especially with the AD rightfully in hot water over his handling of the women’s basketball team. If the UF administration wanted to get rid of Mullen — and there’s no indication that they do — they’d need to resolve the Scott Stricklin situation first so that the coaching search isn’t being run by a potential lame duck.
I can confidently say that Mullen won’t be just fine next year as well if he starts 4-3. I don’t know the schedule off the top of my head, but that kind of performance after the way 2020 ended and what’s gone on here in 2021 is definitely not up the program’s standards.
There also is the fact that with FSU and Miami struggling for years, Clemson being down, and Auburn having hired an outsider to the region, Florida is not cleaning up on the recruiting trail. Unless something drastic turns around, the 2022 class could even potentially be the lowest-rated of the Mullen era.
It wouldn’t be like USC signing a class ranked in the 60s in 2020, but it’d be of the quality level of a transitional class. Mullen already had one of those in 2018, and the 2019 class ended up like one after non-qualifiers and attrition. To have a third in five years is just not sustainable. Yeah, there’s the portal, but I don’t think relying on transfers is a path to consistent success. Sign a class in the mid-teens like UF is threatening to do this year and Mullen enter a zombie state. His tenure will already be dead, it’ll just be a question of when the hammer actually comes down.
No matter what happens with UF, there at least will be other programs in similar boats around the country. Saban is the exception among the titans. Kirk Ferentz is the exception among the programs with more modest expectations. Everywhere else you look, someone’s disappointed about something. So it goes in every era of college football.