It’s the middle of the offseason, so someone made up a classic offseason fodder article about the 13 worst head coaching hires of the last decade.
Why now? Again: middle of offseason. It’s a content desert, though NIL has helped this year. Why a decade? People like round numbers. Why 13 and not some other number? Why, indeed. It doesn’t really matter. The content gods require a sacrifice, and this works as well as anything.
It sparked a discussion on the GC message boards, at least in relation to UF, and I think I can make some solid statements here.
Only one Florida hire made it onto the list, that being Jim McElwain. I would note that only two really qualify for this list: Mac and Dan Mullen. Will Muschamp was hired for the 2011 season, which is more than a decade ago. A few people on the board celebrated Muschamp’s appearance on the list, but that was his ascension at South Carolina. Billy Napier I guess technically qualifies, but everyone on the list is someone whose tenure is already over.
I don’t think anyone is particularly miffed about Mac being on the list, even if he’s at the bottom at No. 13. The thing that got some folks riled up is the fact that Mullen isn’t on the list.
This is recency bias at work, as the memory of how the 2021 team crashed and burned is still fresh in people’s minds. To put this in perspective, though, let’s look at a few of the names further up.
At the top is Chad Morris at Arkansas, and it’s hard to argue against it. He went 0-14 in SEC play in his brief tenure there. Not winning a single conference games is a strong case for a disastrous tenure.
Les Miles at Kansas is No. 2. The Jayhawks immediately lost their meager but measurable momentum from the David Beatty days, and he was ushered out after some very unsavory details about his time at LSU came to light. Nothing good there.
Willie Taggart at FSU is third. He inherited a complete mess from Jimbo Fisher, but he did little to right the ship in two years. He passed on almost as big a mess to his successor, which is never a good sign.
There are some expected names after that: Charlie Strong at Texas, Jeremy Pruitt at Tennessee, Clay Helton at USC. The guy at No. 7, Mike Riley at Nebraska, should be higher. That’s a program that can’t afford bad hires anymore, and he just cratered the place. It’s in contrast to Helton, who only got into this league of bad hire because administrative shuffling left him on the job too long. Riley at least didn’t get the place in hot water with the NCAA like Pruitt did at UT.
So, you’ve also got Butch Jones at Tennessee, Jimmy Lake at Washington, a couple of guys who only won nine games in four (Darrell Hazell, Purdue) or three years (Kevin Sumlin, Arizona). Finally you then have Muschamp in Columbia before getting to Mac.
I’d argue Mac should have a Zook-like place in UF lore. He stocked the place well for the next guy, but the chair was too big for him. He started at a lower baseline, taking over after the terrible decision to retain Muschamp an extra year, compared to the well-run Spurrier program that Zook inherited.
And it’s because McElwain did a considerable amount of digging that Mullen was able to take off. And because Mullen did achieve takeoff, he doesn’t belong on this list.
I mean, again, there are multiple guys in the back half of the rankings who won nine total games over the course of three or four seasons before getting fired in their final campaigns. Hires like that happen all over the place. They’re sadly common, and Mullen at UF wasn’t in that league.
He went to three straight New Year’s Six games, had a Heisman finalist, and the team that got him fired finished the regular season at .500. Every single coach on the list had a season below .500, if not multiple.
Mullen got fired because of trajectory. UF was on a road to becoming a replica of the Mississippi State program that Mullen led for nine years. In retrospect it’s not shocking that he’d try doing the exact same thing in Gainesville as he did in Starkville, though it is surprising that he didn’t aim higher.
“On its way to being Mississippi State” is not a place Florida should be, which is why he got the boot. If Scott Stricklin had stayed the execution and let Mullen try again with a revamped staff, then it could’ve gotten worse. This is the Helton problem, of drifting into irrelevance due to a lack of leadership.
Only the Gators didn’t fall into the trap. As soon as the direction became irrefutable, Stricklin engaged the ejector seat. Mullen with a couple more years could’ve earned himself a place on a list like this one.
Instead, his actual coaching gifts raised the program for a couple of years before it started to crumble underneath him. Guys who see a program sink immediately and can’t get out of it belong on these kinds of lists. Mullen, fired by but also saved from himself by stronger leadership, does not.