I use this newsletter as an outlet for some opinions that are less grounded in empirical fact than the ones I put in regular articles on GC. Mainly that’s because I don’t want to get GC itself flamed for when I go out beyond stuff I can back up with math and links.
As you’ve guessed by now, this is one of those newsletters where I’m going out beyond the purely factual. I can’t prove what’s contained below, but if it demonstrably wasn’t true, it’d be easy to find proof of that.
My hypothesis is that Dan Mullen hasn’t completely adjusted to no longer being a perennial underdog. UF hasn’t been dominant in over a decade, but it’s a top-five job in America. There is a champion’s mentality that is required to get the most out of the job, because we’ve seen that the most anyone can get from it is “literally better than every other team in the country”.
Here’s where I see Mullen still having a Mississippi State mindset that I think is holding him back from maxing out Florida as a program.
Giving himself an out
Here I do not refer to the comments after the Cotton Bowl when he said that the last game the 2020 team played was 11 days prior. He said after the SEC Championship Game that he thought it was the last time that team would play together, so it wasn’t some excuse he thought of during the game. With nearly all the future pros opting out, the exhaustion of a COVID-wracked season, and the general meaninglessness of bowl games, I’ll actually give the team a pass for that one.
What I won’t was Mullen talking about how his team should still go to the playoff if it lost to LSU but beat Alabama. He told the game announcers such in the week leading up to the game against the Tigers.
He gave himself an out, in other words, if his team didn’t win. And sure enough, the team didn’t take LSU seriously enough and lost. The Gators who pushed Alabama to the very end would’ve beaten the Tigers by several scores. That one they prepared sufficiently for. The week before? Not even close.
If you give yourself an out for something, it’s extremely hard not to take it. The head coach at Mississippi State gets built-in outs all the time. Those Bulldogs will never be more talented than at least three teams in their own division, and it could be four or five on the slate depending on the year and schedule rotation.
You can overlook a game in Starkville and not get flak for it for longer than about a week, unless it’s the Egg Bowl, because c’mon, it’s Mississippi State. Of course a member of the traditional SEC underclass will have bad weeks every so often.
You can’t win as much as Mullen did at MSU without working hard and being as clever as possible. That said, there are games like the Egg Bowl when he had one foot out the door in 2017, a season-opening loss to South Alabama and one-point bowl win over Miami (OH) in 2016, or a number of contests against Alabama or LSU where his team got waxed beyond the talent gap that make you wonder about preparation for every single game. Toss 2020 LSU onto that pile too.
Retaining friends
Bailiegh covered this in a recent article of hers, but I want to expand on it.
After the LSU loss, Mullen defended Todd Grantham thusly: “We played pretty good defense for a good part of the year”.
Since when is “pretty good” for part of the year enough? I’ve beaten this dead horse already, but that’s not The Gator Standard. Mullen likes Grantham, though, so Grantham stays while a pair of assistants walk the plank.
A potentially bigger issue is that Mullen has three longtime assistants who seem inseparable from him. John Hevesy and Billy Gonzales came up with Mullen under Urban Meyer from the Bowling Green days and on, with Gonzales only separating himself for a short time after conflicts he had with Meyer. From Mullen’s first season in Starkville, Greg Knox has been by his side too.
Knox and especially Gonzales have shown themselves to be good developers of talent. Kadarius Toney’s transformation was stunning, and Knox has coached a bunch of previously stone-handed running backs into real pass catching threats. Neither is a stellar recruiter, but both have earned their keep in other ways.
Hevesy, however, is not a good recruiter and has the worst reputation on the staff as far as being prickly. He has developed some NFL linemen over the years, but it’s not a large number in part because he keeps starting out with low-rated talent. Another offensive line coach could produce similar results with worse development but average-by-UF-standards recruiting results (instead of awful-by-UF-standards), and he’d have a chance at some real upside surprises by landing far more college-ready players out of high school.
Knox, interestingly enough, was in a similar spot before joining up with Mullen. He was a part of Tommy Tuberville’s mafia at Auburn, one of five assistants to go the distance with him. Some, Knox included, went back to Tuberville’s first season as head coach at Ole Miss in 1995.
Tuberville got the boot on the Plains because his program, which had succeeded early, went stale. He refused to fire any of his loyal soldiers, and they all went down together. Mullen isn’t there yet and doesn’t have as many mafia members — though if Grantham has joined it he’s only got one fewer — but that kind of future is not out of the picture for him eight or nine years in if he won’t replace any buddies who are underperforming.
Recruiting choices
Coaches should be better than recruiting sites at identifying talent, and Mullen has increased average recruit ratings versus Jim McElwain’s time anyway. However, the Mississippi State mentality is perhaps most evident here.
Mullen has accepted commits from more academic risks than his predecessors did. All of them have believed in some borderline guys enough to try to get them in, but none made it a matter of course as Mullen has.
After having three recruits not qualify in 2019, Mullen at least has not again let anyone sign who isn’t going to get in. He has, however, continued to offer guys in the danger zone and keep them around a long time. That’s how we get recent headlines about Florida commits “flipping” to FCS programs. People who pay attention will know what that’s about, but if Mullen and crew are holding spots for those guys, they’re not offering them to others.
In the past two classes there has also been a pattern of accepting commitments from very low-rated offensive line recruits by UF’s standards who have no defining characteristics other than that they are huge. Hevesy just keeps recruiting massive guys that few, if any, other power programs want and then watching some number of them not make it due to grades or get processed out because better players want to join.
Those are things Mississippi State does, not Florida. UF doesn’t take commitments more than a year out from dudes no one else has offered and then sit on the commitments until jettisoning them in a last-minute fire drill. Except it now does, thanks to Hevesy and Mullen.
Meyer’s slogan about only recruiting the top 1% of the top 1% was never attainable, but it set the tone. Mullen’s staff still takes some commitments that could never at any point be construed as striving for the top 1% of the top 1%. He could’ve tried to fix that by now by replacing some of his friends, but letting Ron English go — who was only at MSU in 2017 before coming over to Gainesville — is the only thing of that nature he’s done. English’s on-field coaching was probably more the cause of the firing anyway.
There are other aspects to this too, such as Mullen improving the star ratings in ways that may be less than they appear. Gervon Dexter was finally a 5-star high school recruit for the program, but he only played football for two years in high school. Florida has also taken 4-star tweeners and guys who missed some or all of their senior years to injury. Part of why you go after prized talent is to get help sooner than later, but even some of the higher-rated guys weren’t going to be impact players as freshmen for those kinds of reasons. Plus, they’ve lost at least one blue chip signee to transfer and/or dismissal before fall camp every single season.
Not giving every game full focus, allowing underperforming friends to remain on staff, and recruiting players who are borderline academically and/or athletically are things you can do at Mississippi State and get away with it. As long as you beat three cupcakes, knock off a few of the SEC’s underclass, and catch the Auburns and Texas A&Ms in their down years, you can do that indefinitely in Starkville.
You can’t do those things and max out at Florida. You might be able to put a real scare in an elite Alabama team in one game, but over the course of full seasons, it’ll bite you too many times to become elite yourself. It’s how you end up a Tuberville or a Mark Richt, winning enough to avoid being fired but owning a relatively empty trophy case and being one bad coordinator hire away from getting fired.
Until we see Mullen totally shed his Mississippi State mindset, I don’t anticipate Florida achieving true excellence under his watch.