One step forward, two steps back. That was my reaction to seeing Dan Mullen’s comments about his future with the Florida program at his pre-spring practice presser last week.
It’s not hard to parse them. Bailiegh recorded him as saying this: “I didn’t interview with any NFL teams this year. Most of my focus was on getting us back to Atlanta to get back to the SEC Championship Game. There were a lot of rumors out there, but I didn’t speak to anybody.”
Yes, well, there were zero founded rumors about him actually taking any interviews. The NFL Network reported that the New York Jets had him on their list of candidates to vet, and Adam Shefter reported that Mullen was “open” to going to the pro ranks. There was a local news report that Mullen was going to interview with the Jets, but other reporters shot that down pretty quickly.
So, that’s the step forward. Mullen said the things everyone says when their names are floated for other jobs: I didn’t interview, I didn’t even talk, I’m focused on my job, etc. It’s rote at this point.
Yet, Mullen showed once again that he has a ways to go in doing PR well.
One of the steps back came after he was asked about if his contract situation would lead to negative recruiting. The context for that is this. Mullen has three years left on his initial deal with Florida, but college coaches like to have at least four years to go at all times. That way, they can tell recruits that they’ll be around for all four years because their contracts say so.
Mullen’s response was, “I don’t control that part of it. I’ve gotta worry about what I can control, which is getting the team ready to go for practice on Thursday. That can be in somebody else’s press conference. That would be a good question for them.”
It’s unclear whether the somebody else is a rival coach or Scott Stricklin. It would’ve been worth a clarification in the moment to say that he wasn’t taking a swipe at his boss, but no such thing came.
As an aside, one thing that is pretty clear at this point is that, while the Jets probably did have Mullen on their first shortlist on their own accord, a lot of the other rumors and smoke about Mullen possibly going to the NFL came from his agent. Mullen wants an extension to have at least four years left on his deal, and he probably wants a raise too. He coached up his third Heisman finalist, and besides, there’s a culture among coaches and pro athletes that the size of someone’s salary is a direct measure of the level of respect they have.
However the leaks and rumors have also pointed to the idea that Stricklin doesn’t want the optics of extending and possibly raising a coach who just earned himself a show-cause penalty from the NCAA. UF as an institution had been proud of the fact its football program hadn’t been on probation since the 1980s, but that streak ended because of rule breaking from the head coach himself. I suspect that an updated deal would’ve happened before January was out absent the NCAA issues.
However on top of that, Mullen had already undercut himself before the length of his contract even came up. College athletics is about to go through some of the biggest changes in its history with players soon to be able to make money off of their names, images, and likenesses, and football specifically seems likely to get a new rule that would allow one-time transfers for undergraduate players without requiring them to sit out a year.
Mullen, while supporting NIL rights, said this: “What’s college football going to look like in three or four years? I think there’s a lot of uncertainty with that, that we’re trying to figure out as coaches right now to see what our futures are going to hold.”
All college coaches, from ones who are on the hot seat this year to ones as entrenched as Nick Saban, are thinking about this very thing right now. The problem is that with the way he phrased his answer, it makes it sound like he might really want to jump to the NFL sooner than later.
If his agent hadn’t floated his name so much, those words would have different overtones to them. Instead, it makes the hypothetical negative recruiters’ jobs easier to do, as they can tell players that he has a foot out the door no matter how long his contract goes.
It’s easy to get frustrated with coaches who always seem canned or scripted. The ones who speak freely are more interesting and seem more like real people.
This, however, is why those guys are so guarded. If you get on the wrong side of a narrative, it’s extremely easy to say something off the cuff that perpetuates and/or extends the problem.
Nearly every coach is a mercenary. They have to be, because their employers’ loyalty is increasingly short these days. Alumni tend to be the most loyal on the coaching side, but even that only goes so far. Steve Spurrier coached against UF for a decade, Rich Rodriguez left West Virginia for Michigan, and Pat Fitzgerald was named in the same Shefter report referenced above as being open to going to the NFL. Aside from Saban at Alabama, where when he says “jump” the entire administration says “how high?”, no one’s loyalties extend beyond a few years into the future.
The trick of college coaching is that you can’t say that out loud. You can’t even dance around the idea. If you do, you will get (even more) negative recruiting going against you. You also could get the loudest segment of your fanbase riled up, and while they usually can never be pleased, they have the ability to set the tone for a program in a way that’s utterly out of the coach’s control.
The thing is, we’ve seen Mullen handle delicate situations well. After the George Floyd protests began last summer, he laid low publicly while reportedly doing a good job of communicating with his players behind the scenes. He’s not run the risk of appearing to be a performative phony, and every statement he’s put out has been humane. I can’t imagine him doing a better job, all things considered.
But as we’ve seen, Mullen has an uncanny ability to put his foot in his mouth. Last week was just another example.
The best advice I can give is this: let it go, Elsa. Mullen will be on the sidelines at Florida as long as he’s winning enough and he wants to be there. It took nine years for him to get out of Starkville for a reason. No college program is going to spend what it takes to get him away, and if the NFL comes calling for real, well, that siren song pried no less than Spurrier out of the gig.
Will he want to be at UF a decade from now? I don’t know. You may not want him to be there a decade from now. Remember how you felt when it became clear he retained Todd Grantham? Despite him being the best postwar head coach the program’s had, a lot of Mississippi State fans were tired of Mullen after nine years. Their perspectives have moderated some in the three years since, but almost any time I note a misstep from Mullen on Twitter, a MSU fan will be there to either say “see, we told you so” or just point and laugh.
I will continue to analyze and concern myself with Mullen’s recruiting, player development, roster management, staff choices, and on-field results. I’ve decided not to care so much about whether the man is as emotionally invested in the program as the fans are. He’s not; no head coach is. It’s an actual job to them, and every job that involves fandom from coaches and athletes to writers and actors feels different on the inside. It can feel like a passion, but mostly it feels like, well, a job.
If he wants this particular job, great. If not, he’ll work to find a new one, same as any other working schmo.