GC VIP Stadium Road Audibles — 3/9/20 Edition

Last week, veteran national college football writers Stewart Mandel and Bruce Feldman of The Athletic released their lists of the top 25 head coaches in the country. Their lists are behind the publication’s paywall, though the episode of their podcast The Audible that they recorded about their lists is free.

I do subscribe to The Athletic, so I am able to see their rankings. Without giving away everything, I do want to discuss Dan Mullen’s positioning. I realize not everyone reading this cares about what Mandel and Feldman have to say, but they are two of the most prominent voices in the sport. What they think materially affects the entire sport’s conventional wisdom whether you care for them or not.

The two of them come from different angles. Mandel’s list is heavily weighted towards recent performance, while Feldman takes a longer view. An easy place to see the difference is in their treatments of James Franklin and Jimbo Fisher. Franklin is seventh on Mandel’s list and third on Feldman’s. The reason? The latter still gives Franklin a ton of credit for his historically good run at Vanderbilt. Fisher is 14th on Mandel’s list but sixth on Feldman’s. You’ve probably guessed why. Mandel is primarily looking at Fisher’s 5-6 final season at FSU and 9-4 and 8-5 campaigns at Texas A&M, whereas Feldman is still looking at Fisher as one of the few active head coaches to have won a national championship.

With that in mind, where do you think these two have Mullen? Keep in mind that they put a two-year requirement on it, which means Ryan Day was disqualified from appearing anywhere.

Mandel has Mullen eighth, while Feldman has him 14th.

The only coaches Mandel has ahead of Mullen are ones that have been to the College Football Playoff and Franklin. He’s been doing these rankings a while and put Mullen 19th on his list after Mullen’s Mississippi State tenure ended. Two straight New Year’s Six bowls have moved him up into the top ten.

Feldman doesn’t seem as impressed by Mullen’s job at MSU. He deemed what Mullen did there merely “a solid job” and dinged him for having just one winning record in SEC play in nine years.

It’s temping to go directly to the Franklin comparison, since from a winning percentage standpoint, MSU is most similar to Vandy in the SEC West. It’s not as hopeless and certainly isn’t hamstrung by academic requirements, but Mullen was also in Starkville during the West’s strongest years. He was there as Saban’s Death Star rose up, before Les Miles lost his fastball, when Bobby Petrino briefly made Arkansas a contender, and while Hugh Freeze too-overly cheated his way to fame and fortune. Auburn was volatile as normal but made the national title game twice while Mullen was over there, and TAMU’s Johnny Football heyday happened during that time too.

Meanwhile, Franklin was at Vandy while the SEC East was a shambles in two of his three years. The odd year out was 2012 when Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina all finished in the top ten, and Vandy went 0-3 against them. It’s still very impressive that he got the Commodores to a bowl all three years, turned in a winning SEC record of 5-3 in 2012, and got Vandy in the bottom of the final polls twice.

I’m certainly not trying to take any of that away from him. It’s also a fact that only two of Franklin’s SEC wins (and power conference wins, for that matter) came over teams that finished above .500, with a victory over 8-5 Georgia in 2013 the best of them. In 2014, Mullen beat four SEC teams that finished above .500 and had his team on top of the polls for four weeks. If that’s too many years into the rebuild for you, Mullen had four wins over power conference teams in his first two seasons including two in his first.

Anyway, I think it’s notable that during the nearly hour-long discussion on the podcast, Mullen’s name only came up once. It was during a discussion of Iowa State’s Matt Campbell. While making a broader point, Mandel merely pointed out that Feldman had Campbell two spots behind Mullen at 16th. At no other time was the Gators’ head coach mentioned.

On the one hand, it makes some amount of sense. They focused on the most logical things: the very top and where the lists diverged the greatest amount. Despite Mullen being eighth on one and 14th on the other, he actually wasn’t that controversial. Mandel’s planned recency bias and Feldman being less high on Mullen’s job at MSU accounts for all of their difference on him. They largely have similar takes on him.

The bigger difference was that the coaches Feldman has right ahead of Mullen at tenth, 12th, and 13th are ones that Mandel has ranked 18th through 20th. The guy Feldman has 11th is one Mandel doesn’t have ranked at all. Those make for livelier discussion than “we disagree in a fairly marginal way about this one guy”.

With that said, it also goes to show that Mullen is not yet in a place where he’s a mandatory mention in this kind of discussion. He’s done enough at Florida so far to get only compliments, but he hasn’t yet forced his way into the discussion of the coaching elite among national, conventional wisdom-y sportswriters.

As much as I’d like to argue, that does feel about right. Florida should be in or near the top ten every year, so in a sense Mullen has gotten UF to where it should be but not exceptionally higher. Of course, it’s not as easy as it might seem since three of the last four Gator head coaches were fired in three or four years and combined had one top ten finish.

I do think Mullen will get himself into such discussions before too long. For now, the national observers can continue sleeping on the Gators for a bit. It’s more fun to be the underdog coming up than be the favorite with the burden of expectations anyway.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2