If I could sum up the Gasparilla Bowl in one nine-second sequence from an old sitcom scene, it’d be this one from Arrested Development. The character Michael Bluth pulls a paper bag out of the freezer that has a note saying “DEAD DOVE Do Not Eat!” attached to it. He opens the bag, winces, then says to no one in particular, “I don’t know what I expected.”
An undisciplined team played with an astounding lack of discipline. An offense with clear shortcomings played with all of those shortcomings on display. It was all representative of the second half of the 2021 season, which is all anyone is going to remember. The highlights of the first half will fade into memory as a false start and a misleading sequence of events.
I am still trying to fully make sense of the Dan Mullen era at Florida. Of all people, he should’ve known what he was getting into. He was the first lieutenant of a successful UF coach who ultimately burned out. Not that Jim McElwain saw a relaxed paradise of a situation in Tuscaloosa, or that Will Muschamp had it easy at LSU, Auburn, or Texas. However all of the idiosyncrasies of the Florida job specifically were or should have been known to Mullen because he’d been there before.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the job was too big for him, though that seems a bit too simplistic of a story. There were plenty of stories when he arrived about him staying on top of the details like who was and wasn’t going to class and the personal physical progress of players in Nick Savage’s program.
I am coming around to the idea that it ultimately was the COVID-19 pandemic that undid the Mullen regime. It was hard on everyone for a lot of different reasons, and to be clear, the suffering and loss of life that continue to result from the SARS-CoV-2 virus far outweigh anything in sports.
I will note that former player Brett DioGuardi, who now works for the Florida-focused 247 Sports site, has talked about how discipline slipped during the 2020 offseason. That was his final year on the team as long snapper, so he’d know.
He talked about how without regular, in-person contact with the team, the standards began to slip. Again, it was a very hard time for all. Plenty of players went through scares at the least and actual loss at worst from the pandemic, so keeping sports the top thing was not always appropriate or possible.
But Mullen never was able to get back on top of things afterwards. It manifested first on defense in 2020, and the poor results spoke for themselves. Mullen is more personally involved with the offense, so I’m not surprised it held out better. That side of the ball also had some real on-field leadership from the likes of Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts, Kadarius Toney, and Stone Forsythe, while the defense never seemed to find its replacement leader after David Reese graduated.
Recruiting also slid some, with the 2021 class that was being built throughout 2020 rating outside the top ten after the 2020 class finished ninth. The Mullen staff was always better at recruiting when meeting players in-person, but that wasn’t possible due to restrictions. They tried making up ground some with virtual visits, but those didn’t prove as fruitful. They didn’t step things up in any other visible ways, and not only did the class full of 2020 seniors struggle, but the one of 2020 juniors (the present 2022 class) was on its way to a bigger fall before Mullen’s firing.
Because Mullen let things get away from him and didn’t catch back up, the program disintegrated before our eyes. The lack of accountability for Marco Wilson — who didn’t come out of the game for the shoe toss and was captain the next week — turned into a nearly whole-team lack of discipline and lack of attention to detail.
Without accountability for the real main coaching problem on defense, that being Todd Grantham and not a well-regarded corners coach in the fired Torrian Gray, the coaching seemed to slip too. The offensive line’s problems with false starts is still mind-boggling, for instance, as was the commitment to the clap cadence that played into that problem.
And as we’ve seen late in the season and in the bowl, there were plenty of places where lesser veterans were playing ahead of more promising young players. If actual performance on the field isn’t going to matter, then what is anyone even doing anymore?
Ultimately, things unraveled so far that Mullen was either unwilling or unable (or both) to get things back on track. I don’t think they would’ve unraveled so quickly without the strange circumstances caused by the pandemic, and therefore he might’ve lasted longer. I don’t think he would’ve stayed on a decade, though, and we can see that with the new staff coming in.
The issue of work-life balance is one that I think is instructive to draw the contrast between Mullen and Billy Napier.
Mullen wanted work-life balance, so he and his staff took time off and did less work than what other staffs with poor work-life balance do. That’s all well and good, but there weren’t enough people minding the store while they were gone.
Napier, on the other hand, has a strategy for maintaining work-life balance that consists of hiring more people everywhere. More work gets done, but also everyone gets to see their family and take time off. There just are more people around to handle the load, so no one gets overburdened.
Mullen could’ve hired more staff if he had made the case for it, but he didn’t. I suspect it was some combination of him believing so much in his ability to out-coach opponents that he didn’t think he needed an army of support staff and also that he didn’t want to manage a lot more people.
Whatever it is, the core approach of the program is about to change drastically. I expect growing pains in the first year before a potential takeoff in 2023. Whatever the pace is, I don’t think we’ll see much like the Gasparilla Bowl again for quite a while.