SEC Media Days kicks off today, and I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing that Dan Mullen is going first among the coaches. The commish Greg Sankey gets the first word, naturally, at 11:30 am Eastern, and then Mullen, Zach Carter, and Ventrell Miller make their appearances at 12:15 pm.
Mullen dealt with communication surrounding the protests and COVID situation in the summer of 2020 surprisingly well, largely by saying little publicly and letting the UAA’s people do the heavy lifting. However, he has repeatedly caused headaches ever since.
First it was his “pack the Swamp” line following the Texas A&M loss — and right before the virus ripped through the team and postponed the LSU game. He followed it up the next month with his tone-deaf postgame Halloween costume following him inflaming a brawl against Missouri. Some didn’t like his reasons/excuses for a poor bowl performance. Then either he or his agent appeared to stir up NFL rumors in a ploy to get an extension less than a month after the NCAA hit him with sanctions and put the program on probation for the first time since the Galen Hall days.
Mullen has mostly laid low since spring practice ended, and he did eventually get his extension and raise. I don’t want to oversell the situation as being direly fraught with him one more PR incident away from hitting the road. We’re a long way from that.
But I have covered SEC Media Days long enough to know how the whole thing works. Sometimes coaches make news with announcements, antics, or even subpoenas. Sometimes big stories like playoff expansion or the advent of the SEC Network take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. Sometimes you’ll even see good reporters asking great, open-ended questions to actually try to learn something new.
More often, what drives events are premeditated narratives. A lot of the media members decide ahead of time what story lines they want to cover and might even pre-write large portions of their stories for convenience’s sake. They’ll then ask very specific or pointed questions — or skip questions entirely and just lead the coaches with statements that begin with “talk about” — to elicit quotes to put into those stories like puzzle pieces.
There’s a reason why Nick Saban’s media days appearances tend to feature him acting harried and swatting down leading questions. It’s because everyone wants a quote from the king, and almost everyone’s got a story that’s 75% written and could use a little of Saban’s verbal fairy dust to make it sing.
I mentioned in last week’s newsletter that the early days of season preview season are about the big, broad narratives. They’re about welcoming back the people who haven’t been paying close attention to the sport all offseason.
So for those people, who make up the majority of college football fans, essentially no time has passed since January. The last impression they remember of Florida is the giant rotten egg they laid in Arlington followed by Mullen talking, as far as they can recall, about how his scout team gave it their all or whatever. It’s a short trip from there to remembering the Darth Vader costume and “pack the Swamp”.
The Gator beat writers will all have better things to do than try to goad Mullen into rehashing any of that stuff, but people who cover 13 other teams will also be there. They will be writing for people whose impression of Mullen is that of a cartoonish buffoon who can’t read a room and will say anything, but in a bad way. Florida coaches have been known to say anything, but we’re not talking about the Spurrier quips that made everyone but their targets laugh.
There are only two ways around the SEC Media Days narrative trap: pull a Muschamp or Jimbo and filibuster for most of your podium time, or be Bobby Petrino or Joker Phillips and be so dreadfully boring that you put everyone to sleep. Mullen is capable of the former but hasn’t yet tried it; if there’s ever been a time to go for it, now’s the time.
I fully expect someone to ask something that is intended to provoke a Narrative moment. Florida has had months to help Mullen with good PR strategies, but by now he is who he is. He will sometimes say something that he shouldn’t. Sometimes it’ll be about something meaningful (pack the Swamp), and sometimes it won’t (post-bowl comments).
So either it’s good that Mullen is going first, as that will allow 13 other coaches the chance to wipe away any of Mullen’s potential missteps with their own news making, or it’s bad, because he might set a new Narrative that could grow so strong that some other coaches will get asked about it. NIL is the most natural catalyst here, so I really hope UF got him their talking points early so he could practice.
Regardless, I recommend ignoring most of media days unless you don’t have better things to do. It’s mostly sportswriters fishing for quotes for prewritten stories, and you can just read the stories if you really care that much about them. It’s nice to see SECMD happening since it means the season is coming up soon, but it hasn’t reliably made real, substantial news in a long time.