The college football preview magazines, while late for the reason you can figure out, have begun hitting newsstands. If you take their top 25 orders to be predictive of where conference standings end up, Florida is the early favorite for the SEC East.
It’s only a lead by a hair, though. Athlon, my favorite of the publications, has UF sixth and Georgia seventh. Lindy’s has the Gators at fifth and the Bulldogs also seventh.
I’ve seen some Gator fans express a level of anxiety, or maybe call it a sense of urgency, around the importance of Dan Mullen winning the division this year. It’s due to a sometimes-cited factoid that every head coach of the BCS era to win a national title won at least a division championship by his third year. This being Mullen’s third year with no East titles to his name, it stands to reason that it’s got to be now or else it’s a sign that he won’t bring home the ultimate prize.
I don’t love that stat for a variety of reasons. It doesn’t take into account the toughness of a division at the dawn of a coach’s tenure, nor does it account for coaches who take over programs in great shape. Larry Coker won the national title in his first season, but it wasn’t because of any brilliance on his part. The factoid also isn’t even strictly true, since Phillip Fulmer didn’t win the SEC East until his fifth full season at Tennessee but brought home the first BCS championship the following year.
That particular stat can only go back so far because eventually you start getting to programs that were independent either when eventual national title-winning coaches began their tenures or when those titles were won. You also get things like the 1990 season, in which Colorado’s Bill McCartney and Georgia Tech’s Bobby Ross both defied the pattern.
McCartney is exactly the kind of coach that the third-year rule doesn’t take into account. He took over a program that had undergone a slow slide under Bill Mallory and then went firmly into a ditch under Chuck Fairbanks. Not only did McCartney not win a conference title in his first three seasons, but he went 2-8-1, 4-7, and 1-10 in those initial years. Today, that’d get you fired.
According to McCartney’s Wikipedia page, he actually got an extension after the 1-10 season. He must’ve impressed his bosses with his plan. It worked, because the Buffaloes jumped to 7-5 the next season. They’d never finish worse than 6-6 under McCartney’s watch again, and starting in his eighth season, the Buffs won three straight Big Eight titles with the middle one coming with the shared ’90 national title.
Perhaps because hooks come ever faster as the years go along, McCartney is the last head coach to undertake a real reclamation project and turn it into a national championship. Bob Stoops and Pete Carroll may have taken over blue bloods that were floundering, but none were in as bad a shape as Fairbanks-era Colorado. Every Alabama coach since Bear Bryant has won ten games in a season, including Dennis Franchione and Mike Shula, so no, Nick Saban doesn’t count despite how tumultuous things were in Tuscaloosa post-Gene Stallings.
Saban at LSU is a stronger case given how bad things cratered at the end of Gerry DiNardo — fired after going 5-7 in 1997 and starting 1998 in the top ten but going 2-8 in the first ten games of the season — but even that wasn’t as huge a rebuild. There was talent there, as evidenced by the preseason top ten rank in ’98. Saban then fulfilled our little factoid by winning a weak West division with a 5-3 record in his second season, and he took the division the next year by winning a three-way tie for second behind an ineligible Alabama team that actually finished first. Those are hardly strong validation.
Which brings us back to Mullen, I think. He took over a team that had missed a bowl after it quit on the season. If he was in an SEC East last year in which no other team finished better than 5-3, he’d have won the division and fulfilled the prophecy. Instead, Georgia was a top five team again and had the depth to outlast Florida in Jacksonville. It didn’t help that Mullen and Todd Grantham had unquestionably their worst coaching games in 2019 at the same time in that game, but UGA was the better team in no small part because Kirby Smart had a couple years’ head start on molding his program.
If Florida doesn’t win the East this year, I don’t think it means anything in relation to Mullen’s ability to win a national championship in the future. It no more excludes him than back-to-back East titles meant Jim McElwain was headed to a title after 2016. Everyone saw how those division wins were fool’s gold and that the program’s trajectory wasn’t particularly upward. Florida could easily see a repeat of 2012 when the team went 11-1 but didn’t play in the SEC Championship Game because of a loss to Georgia. Going 9-3 to 10-2 to 11-1 would be a sign of progress in the right direction, not a sign of doom.
There are a variety of reasons why this season would be the one to strike. Scheduling is a big one, with Florida drawing Ole Miss from the West with Georgia getting Alabama. The turnover in the coaching staff and offensive line at UGA bodes poorly for a team that missed spring practice, while UF has much more stability.
The opportunity is there, and this season is a chance for Mullen to permanently alter the narrative of his career. He was never going to do much more at Mississippi State than getting to No. 1 in the polls for a month in 2014 because it’s Mississippi State. Knocking off Georgia, with its run of recent success and gaudy recruiting classes, would be a real statement.
But, it may not happen. It could come down to bad luck, or maybe even something COVID-19 related. But regardless, you should not take Mullen not winning the division this year as a sign that he’ll never get it done. And hopefully, he’ll just go ahead and win the division and make all of this moot.