The more time goes on, the more I realize that Dan Mullen is something of a singular figure as a football coach.
He doesn’t belong to too many coaching trees himself. After four years as a wide receivers on the I-AA (now FCS) level, he got his first call-up to the majors as a GA for Paul Pasqualoni at Syracuse in 1998. He then went to Notre Dame for two more years as a GA, at which point he entered Urban Meyer’s orbit. His first full-time I-A/FBS coaching gig was then in 2001 at Bowling Green for Meyer, and he only left Meyer’s side when he became a head coach.
It’s very unusual for a coach with real potential to spend three years as a GA after already working as a position coach, even when jumping up a level like that. It’s not like how Billy Napier needed to spend a year in the beginnings of Nick Saban’s reputation laundromat as an analyst after getting the Clemson OC job way too early and then getting fired. And anyway, Napier only was an analyst that one year. He was too good to keep off the sidelines, whereas Mullen was a GA for three seasons, two of them at the same school.
My educated guess is that Mullen was a risk to the recruiting department, so that’s why it took him a while to get a top-subdivision full coaching job. He had to wait for Meyer, a guy he personally clicked with, to get a head coaching position of his own to make that jump. Even after four years of position coaching at Bowling Green and Utah and some time as OC at Florida, the anecdotes about him in Buddy Martin’s book Urban’s Way make it sound like the best recruiting strategy with Mullen was to hide him in a back office as much as possible.
So besides having little exposure to other major figures outside of Meyer, he has no coaching tree to speak of. A couple of his former defensive coordinators got head coaching jobs, but A) they earned their chops as defensive minds well before working for him, and B) none has worked out all that well. Manny Diaz flamed out at Miami, though one could argue he should’ve been given more time, and Geoff Collins hasn’t worked out at all at Georgia Tech (and worked for Jim McElwain at UF between his time working for Mullen and going to Atlanta).
Mullen has little in the way of an offensive coaching tree outside of Brian Johnson, who’s young and still climbing the ranks. Part of that is that Mullen personally was his own OC, and that is a major position in the pipeline that gets people head coaching jobs. And even though he employed quarterbacks coaches, most people outside the Mississippi State and Florida programs attributed quarterback development to him since he was heavily involved in it.
The other main reason is that he had two assistants who never left his side from 2009 to 2021 in Greg Knox and John Hevesy, and another in Billy Gonzales who stayed with him from 2013 and on. Two of those, Hevesy and Gonzales, increase the insularity factor since they both were Meyer assistants at BGSU, Utah, and UF.
And now with someone taking over a Mullen program for the second time, we can see that others have a hard time picking up where he left off.
Joe Moorhead is generally thought of as a bright offensive mind and a true innovator in the RPO space. When he took over at Mississippi State, he couldn’t keep the positive momentum going despite inheriting a truly elite defense. Some of that was that he simply tried to make Nick Fitzgerald into a player he’s not as a passer, which was a bad move. But overall, the offensive dysfunction was off the charts compared to post-2011 or so Mullen in Starkville. There weren’t any indications that the offense was about to fall off a cliff, but it did.
Now in Gainesville, Napier is bemoaning the lack of players mentally ready to go.
To a large extent, it’s not a straight repeat of Moorhead at MSU. There have been multiple former players who talked about discipline taking a nose dive during the Covid-altered 2020 offseason. Mullen was just not cut out to lead a team remotely, and the team suffered in a lot of respects. Discipline was probably the biggest, as it first fell away on defense in ’20 and then on offense in ’21.
However, Mullen and his staff seem to me to have a fairly idiosyncratic way of developing players. I can’t tell you all of the details, but they definitely seem to teach things in phases rather than develop guys holistically over time.
The best example I can give you is the lack of a hurry-up offense. Down two scores with nine minutes to go against Kentucky in 2018, UF leisurely worked its way down the field to score to draw within five 21-16 (the two-point conversion failed). The Gators did go 99 yards, but they took 5:22 to do it. By the time the defense forced a punt, UK had run all but half a minute off the clock. If I recall correctly, Mullen said after the game that they basically hadn’t installed the hurry-up yet because they were working on other things with Feleipe Franks.
We saw that again in 2019 with Kyle Trask. Down two scores with 5:43 to go against LSU, Florida went 71 yards in 15 plays and used up 5:06. The drive ended on downs, but even if the Gators had scored, they’d have only had less than a minute to work with. Then down two scores with 10 minutes to go against Georgia, the Gators went 75 yards on 17 plays in 6:50 to score with 3:11 on the clock. That sounds less egregious, but every Bulldog drive that game was longer than three minutes except when the end of the first half forced a field goal attempt. Mullen just didn’t prepare his quarterbacks for hurry up drives in their first years as starters (and Trask was even a mid-year replacement).
There are probably examples of this kind of thing all over the offense, where a staff that lacked a lot of outside influence at the top — the top being Mullen and his three main henchmen — developed their own way of growing and managing a program. It worked as far as it went, but then when someone else came in afterwards, they were basically like, “huh?”
I suspect Napier is overselling the situation a little for motivational purposes. He seems pretty honest and straightforward about things, but his biggest influence by a mile is Nick Saban. Saban loves to send his players messages through the media, and some of that may be going on.
But also may be the case that it just takes a little time to turn a Mullen program back into a more conventional one. Napier’s talk of going heavy in the portal could be partially a motivation ploy, but it also may be his way of trying to fast-forward the process of getting things in Gainesville to a state he better recognizes.