Dan Mullen has lost a lot this year: games, reputation, standing within the sport. Something that I think is well and truly lost now is trust.
I don’t know how anyone can trust Mullen after this past weekend. The last straw for me was his comment after the game about not going to sing the alma mater with the band for the second straight week.
The real reason almost certainly is that he was frustrated and embarrassed about the way his team played and wanted to get out of the stadium as quickly as possible. He instead said he didn’t realize the band was at the game. This, despite him walking through two lines of instrumentalists pregame and hearing the fight song and stands tunes all game long.
It’s one thing for Mullen to dissemble about strategic matters. He hides and obfuscates and prevaricates when it comes to depth charts, game plans, and injuries. All coaches do that to some degree, though few as thoroughly as he does. It’s another thing to blatantly lie about the small things too, expecting you’ll get away with it because either you think your audience will believe literally anything you say or you think they’re not intelligent enough to see through it.
Mullen could in theory rebuild things in Gainesville. Coaches have come back from difficult situations before. Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly and the school by proxy were responsible for a student videographer’s death in his first year. He also had a bunch of wins stripped due to NCAA penalties and went 4-8 in 2016. He’s still on the job in South Bend.
The difference is that Kelly took the Irish to the BCS National Championship Game in his third year. Alabama cleaned their clocks in an uncompetitive blowout, but he still went 12-0 to get there. And then after overhauling his staff following the 4-8 season, he’s won at least ten game in each year since with a pair of Playoff appearances. He has results to back up his missteps and difficult persona.
Mullen has some impressive almost-wins and some nice bowl bids. That’s it. He has never come close to 12-0, with both losses in 2019 come mostly from serious defensive flaws that were always too bad to allow the team to win.
So if you’re inclined to want to give Mullen more time, he has two problems. One is that, as a head coach, he’s not yet done anything to suggest he can put it all together at once. He built a championship-caliber defense at Mississippi State right before leaving — the Bulldogs’ 2018 unit was easily a top five defense — and he guided a championship-caliber offense at Florida in 2020. The latter is his specialty, but the three most prominent players either signed with or committed to his predecessor. You’ll note that the defense and offense I just referenced didn’t play in the same year or for the same programs.
The other problem is that he’s completely shredded his credibility. He has done things that go against the grain. He’s kept His Guys on staff even as they’ve underperformed as recruiters and often as coaches. He claims his evaluations are better than those of the recruiting services. He bristles at all criticism and turns reasonable questions back onto reporters rather than address them head-on.
His Guys have not improved on the trail or on the field. His evaluations have netted a lot of projects on offense and tweeners on defense. If not for a recent liberalization of transfer waivers from the NCAA, things could’ve fallen apart much faster than they already have. Oh, and the questions all now seem a lot more reasonable than the guy who refuses to take said questions seriously.
Without an ability to trust the guy in charge, there’s little to do except either get rid of him or assign someone to babysit the program to make sure he’s not making more bad decisions. He’s made some tough calls that fly in the face of what logic from the outside would suggest, none bigger than retaining Todd Grantham after a disastrous ’20 campaign on defense, and the outside logic has been right far more often than Mullen has.
As a couple of other outlets’ beat writers have pointed out, the contracts for the six highest-paid assistants expire at season’s end. Mullen’s buyout doesn’t drop from its present $12 million — $6 million right away, then $1 million a year for six years — for another couple of years. There’s no better time to make a change than now, because replacing assistants will require either giving them extra money or multi-year deals with significant-for-assistant-coach buyouts to get them to join a guy on an extreme hot seat.
Florida could do all that, pouring more money behind Mullen and quite possibly signing up for two straight recruiting classes (2022 and 2023) that are far below UF’s normal standards. It’d be doing it for a guy that no one can trust anymore to boot.
Or, it could bite the bullet and make the change now without potentially throwing good money after bad and then find someone everyone can trust.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’ll feel different if Florida wins out for starters. Also, Scott Stricklin is probably in hot water himself for his handling of Cameron Newbauer, and leadership seems to be lacking from the very top of the institution these days.
What I do know is that nothing Mullen says anymore can be taken at face value. He had thrown away his margin for error and benefit of the doubt, and UF should make its decisions about his future very much in that light.