My column for the main GC site last week was about where Dan Mullen stands among current college head football coaches. It provoked more discussion than usual on the GC boards, and most of it was dissenting. The general vibe from the majority of responders was that I had ranked Mullen too high by saying he should be in the second half of the top ten.
I was surprised but probably shouldn’t have been. There is a contingent of people who were so burned by the decision to retain Todd Grantham that they are going to be down on Mullen until either Florida holds Alabama to fewer than 30 points or Grantham gets a pink slip. Fair enough. I’ve had my say on that — Grantham should never have been hired in the first place, but also his work last year was partially reflective of pandemic-related factors and not representative of him as a DC over the long haul — so I’ll move on from this point.
I will note that it’s not clear to me who UF should’ve hired instead of Mullen in the 2017-18 hiring cycle. That’s the thing about being down on a head coach: at some point, you have to say who you’d like instead.
Among the consensus top coaches in college football right now, most were unavailable for Florida to go for. Saban and Swinney weren’t coming. Neither was Ed Orgeron, who no one in orange and blue would’ve wanted anyway. He wasn’t even considered one of the best until after 2019. Can you seriously imagine Florida making a run at Brian Kelly, who was one year removed from a 4-8 campaign at the time, or Jimbo Fisher? Jimbo was slinking away from his smoking wreck in Tallahassee for Texas at the time. Lincoln Riley has no reason to leave Oklahoma and hadn’t proven himself a complete head coach yet with some bad defenses to his name.
Ryan Day is the only one who was “available” in the way we normally think about it. Even then, I don’t think he was going to come. The Zach Smith stuff that ultimately ended Urban Meyer’s tenure in Ohio State didn’t come to light until summer of 2018, but Day was already seen as a likely successor by November of 2017.
Meyer never stays in one place long, and his deteriorating health as was seen on the sidelines in ’18 had to be known internally by then. Given the choice between cleaning up UF after Jim McElwain or inheriting a powerhouse in Columbus, even if you don’t know exactly when in the latter case, it’s not a hard decision.
Just look at the hires from the 2017-18 cycle as ranked by Athlon. First is Scott Frost at Nebraska. Third is Chip Kelly at UCLA. Florida went after those two with differing closeness to hires if the reporting was correct, and neither presently appears in top 25 lists for coaches, much less in the top ten as Mullen sometimes does. Mullen was second in Athlon’s rankings, and Fisher was fourth.
Willie Taggart at FSU was fifth, Joe Moorhead at Mississippi State was sixth, and Chad Morris at Arkansas was seventh. All were fired during or after their second years. Kevin Sumlin was eighth, and he was fired in the middle of his third. Jeremy Pruitt was ninth, and he at least made it to the end of his third year before getting canned.
Scrolling down through the list, there aren’t many who stand out from that cycle. Mario Cristobal has been good at Oregon, particularly in recruiting, but a third straight former Saban assistant who likes ball control offense wasn’t going to happen. Billy Napier at UL-Lafayette has been a success, but he wasn’t prominent enough for the Florida job at the time. Jonathan Smith has done a good, if slow, rebuild at Oregon State, but you didn’t know who he was until I just mentioned him.
Looking ahead to the 2018-19 cycle hires, and Day is the only one I could see Florida going after. There’s something of a case to be made for Neal Brown getting West Virginia back on track, but I can’t see UF considering him. He’d gone 4-8, 10-3, and 11-2 at Troy through the 2017 season, which looks good. However I don’t think the Gators would dip down to a Sun Belt head coach, and that record is not far off from McElwain’s run at Colorado State. No one hires an approximation of what they just fired.
So in a lot of ways, Mullen was the best Florida could get unless they wen’t for someone from the NFL. UF even dodged a real bullet with Kelly. He reportedly came close to taking the job, but every sportswriter who knows him at all says his personality is a poor fit for a fishbowl job in the SEC. He’s also taking the scenic route in his UCLA rebuild, something that’d get him fired in a place with less patience. Maybe Frost would’ve done better at Florida than Nebraska; I’m sure he would, in fact, since the Huskers were in significantly worse shape. I don’t know if he’d be doing better than Mullen has, though.
We’ll see about the defense, but I’m on the record as expecting real improvement beyond just them getting to play some cupcakes this year. Mullen has been upgrading the recruiting side of things too, most recently with the hire of South Florida specialist Corey Bell, and his portal work remains deft as ever. He was never going to turn things around as quickly as Meyer did, but Grantham’s retaining aside, you can see where he’s continuing to try to make improvements.
It may be that his chummy nature regarding guys like Grantham and John Hevesy will be his undoing. Time will tell. In the meantime, he’s got the Gators back to the upper end of where they’ve been historically, and that’s more than can be said for a lot of hires both in UF’s recent history and at programs that were also on the market for coaches when Florida hired him.