Cards on the table: I thought Florida would get smoked by Alabama.
It wasn’t even about the loss to LSU the prior week. I knew that was on the lower end of UF’s execution spectrum this year, and simple regression to the mean would probably bring them up in the following game.
Against Alabama, the Gators were near the top of the spectrum. I saw plays from Brad Stewart at the star position that I frankly didn’t think we’d ever see. We also saw Mohamoud Diabate play unusually well in pass defense and Amari Burney’s best run stuff ever. Trey Dean had a grown-man interception where he ripped the ball away from a receiver who’d basically caught it already. The offense had fewer obvious best-yet performances because it’s played well often this year, but it still had a lot of terrific performances.
The game will always bother me like a grain of sand stuck in my brain because of how much of a blown chance it was. Change a handful of plays and the Gators win by multiple scores. They really were that close not just to winning but winning with room to spare.
It is also for that reason that I don’t want to hear anything about Dan Mullen not living up to any three-year tests.
You can find multiple people out there pushing the idea that a coach won’t win a national title if he doesn’t hit a particular benchmark by Year 3. There are at least a couple of variants, but the most straightforward of these says a coach must at least win a division title in his first three seasons, or else a No. 1 finish is out of the question.
The evidence for this test is basically what’s happened since 2000. Just look at the guys who won titles and see where they topped out at their first three seasons.
- 2000: Bob Stoops (national title in Year 2)
- 2001: Larry Coker (national title in Year 1)
- 2002: Jim Tressel (national title in Year 2)
- 2003: Nick Saban, LSU (SEC title in Year 2)
- 2004: Pete Carroll (Pac-10 title in Year 2)
- 2005: Mack Brown (division title in Year 2)
- 2006: Urban Meyer, Florida (national title in Year 2)
- 2007: Les Miles (national title in Year 3)
- 2009: Nick Saban, Alabama (national title in Year 3)
- 2010: Gene Chizik (national title in Year 2)
- 2013: Jimbo Fisher (ACC title in Year 3)
- 2014: Urban Meyer, Ohio State (national title in Year 3)
- 2016: Dabo Swinney (ACC title in Year 3)
- 2019: Ed Orgeron (national title in Year 3)
It shouldn’t take too much thought to see how this starts to fall apart.
First, the test becomes something of a tautology for the guys who won a national title inside their first three years. How do you know they were national title-worthy? They won one. QED.
Second, the bar of division title is pretty mushy. It says more about the division than the team.
Brown’s second team, the 1999 Longhorns, went 9-5. It lost to 6-6 NC State and wasn’t competitive in a bowl game against 8-4 Arkansas. It finished in the 20s of the polls. Brown’s first and third teams each went 9-3 and finished in the top 16 of the polls. They were better, but somehow the least-good team of his early run got him to pass the test.
Or take Swinney, who is the one the three-year test proponents do the most hemming and hawing about. First you must litigate how much of his seven-game run as interim in 2008 counts towards this. If it does count, he topped out at a division title in his second season. That team in his first full season went 9-5 and finished 24th in the AP Poll and unranked in the Coaches’ Poll. His second full-season team went 6-7, and his third won a bad ACC and lost its bowl 70-33.
Besides, Jim McElwain won twice as many division titles as Brown did inside his first three years. Passing the test may be necessary if you believe in it, but it’s obviously not sufficient.
Next, you’ll notice some pretty sketchy stuff. We’re going to cite Coker as precedence for anything? C’mon now. And Chizik? He passed the three-year test but was fired after his Year 4.
For another thing, how many of these guys took over real wrecks? Most replaced underachievers who everyone could see were not living up to the potential of the programs. Stoops’s predecessor John Blake went under .500 for three straight years, and he followed a one-year stint by Howard Schnellenberger (5-5-1). That’s about as bad as it gets, and his 2000 title team is generally considered one of the weaker ones of the BCS era.
Suppress your gag reflex for a moment and consider FSU. It has three national titles in its history. There is no reason it couldn’t win another in the future. I know, I know. Just go with me for a sec.
Fisher drove the program into a ditch before leaving for Texas A&M. The program then made things worse with its hire and quick fire of Willie Taggart. I have no idea if Mike Norvell is national title material or not, but there isn’t any chance he wins a division in his first three seasons. Primarily, it’s because a fully operational death star of a program in Clemson is also in his division. I don’t know if Saban himself could overhaul FSU quickly enough to be able to beat Clemson by Year 3, and Norvell’s first season was a disjointed pandemic year to boot.
As for Fisher himself, he didn’t get a division win in his first three years at Texas A&M. Too bad for him, I guess, though maybe his past title at FSU exempts him from these three-year tests. You’d have to ask the people who make them — and they won’t have a good answer for you because they’re fitting observed data points to a pattern rather than analyzing the mechanism of how things actually happen.
Thing is, if the SEC had gotten rid of divisions as other leagues like the ACC did, then Fisher would’ve been in Atlanta with the equivalent of a division title. He’d have passed this three-year test and Mullen wouldn’t have.
The handle I use on Twitter and the Gator Country boards is Year2, which is a reference to a WordPress blog I started in 2006 for Meyer’s second season. He was known for big leaps in his second seasons at Bowling Green and Utah, so I expected the same for him at UF and made grand plans to chronicle his sophomore effort at UF.
Back then, second-year success was the thing everyone looked for. Stoops and Tressel had won national titles in their second seasons by then, and Meyer was about to. Other prominent coaches like Carroll and Mark Richt had sizable record improvements in their second seasons. I made an effort at the time to study those second-year surges and figure out patterns.
I don’t do that anymore because there just wasn’t much to it. Every situation was different enough that a general rule just wasn’t there. I did discover one or two worthwhile things, but I gave up on any kind of two-year test. And indeed, if you look back at the list above, after 2006 all the coaches except Chizik have their highest accomplishments in their third years instead of second as was mostly the case before.
So, I think you can safely ignore any talk out there about three-year tests and whether Mullen passed one or not. The important bar to clear in modern college football is, frankly, not getting fired (Zook, McElwain) or being put squarely on a burning hot seat (Muschamp) after three years. If you can do that, you’re doing better than most.
Mullen never was in danger of either situation, so he passed the three-year test that matters. Don’t worry about the rest.