Last week, Toledo’s Jason Candle became the first FBS head coach to announce a positive COVID-19 test. Thankfully he’s not feeling any symptoms, and the exposure came from someone outside the athletic department.
Seeing the news jogged my mind, though. Dan Mullen hasn’t had a positive test yet — obviously, since Candle is the first — but Scott Stricklin has. The Gators’ AD said he was being careful, but he still caught the virus anyway. There’s not really a way to guarantee a person won’t get SARS-CoV-2 if that person needs to be around other people on a regular basis.
Mullen will need to be around other people if there is a 2020 football season, and the players have already begun showing up positive. Not too many, and none with bad symptoms, but it has happened.
So if Mullen were to catch COVID-19, which is a real possibility if games happen, he would need to isolate himself. That means someone else would need to take over in his stead.
I’m sure UF has already started talking about this possibility and working on a plan. It would need to be a flexible plan because if Mullen catches the virus, it’s possible that any number of other coaches might get it too. If they only come up with one potential interim, the plan goes out the window if that guy also tests positive around the same time.
There are a couple of different issues when it comes to replacing Mullen. He runs the program as head coach, sure, but he’s also the primary play caller.
The latter issue is the smaller one. Mullen already uses a collaborative environment on game days where his offensive assistants can suggest or call their own plays at times. There are several guys on staff who know the offense well enough that Mullen will take their advice on Saturdays.
The obvious candidate for primary play caller would be Billy Gonzales. He and John Hevesy share the co-offensive coordinator title, but Gonzales was the standalone play-calling offensive coordinator for Illinois in 2012. He has some experience and, as I’ll go over later, goes way back with Mullen.
Despite the way the coaching titles work, the backup would probably be Brian Johnson. He has the closest relationship with the quarterbacks as their position coach, and he called plays for Houston as offensive coordinator in 2017. None of the other offensive assistants have play calling experience that I’m aware of outside of Gonzales and Johnson.
There are three different ways the team could go on the head coaching question.
The first would be to put Todd Grantham in charge. He’s the highest-paid assistant, has a coordinator title to himself, and is in charge of the defense in a way that none of the offensive assistants are in charge of the offense. The potential drawback there is he has no head coaching experience, and the program might want his attention pulled away from his defensive responsibilities.
The second route would be to look at one of the two assistants on the staff who do have head coaching experience. Safeties coach Ron English was head coach at Eastern Michigan from 2009-13, and tight ends coach Tim Brewster was head coach at Minnesota from 2007 to seven games into the 2010 season.
My guess is that English would get the nod over Brewster. Brewster’s potential advantage is that he actually oversaw a Power 5 program. I’m not sure how much that matters given that we’re talking about a short-term interim situation here. He also only joined the staff last winter, and thanks to spring practice being canceled, he hasn’t spent much if any time around the players in a football context to date.
English, meanwhile, joined Mullen’s staff in Starkville in 2017 and moved over to Gainesville the next year. With him now on his fourth year of being a Mullen assistant, he’s in better position to maintain a continuity of culture and expectations. And, for what it’s worth, he has defensive coordinator experience at big jobs like Michigan and Louisville, so it’s not like his head job at a MAC school is all he’s got for having major responsibilities. Outside of his time as head coach in Minneapolis, Brewster has never held a coordinator title other than recruiting coordinator.
The third option would be to put one of Mullen’s most trusted lieutenants in charge. Gonzales and Hevesy go back the furthest, as they and Mullen were all Urban Meyer assistants at Bowling Green, Utah, and Florida. Hevesy went to Mississippi State with Mullen in 2009, and Gonzales rejoined Mullen there in 2013. Running backs coach Greg Knox is the third of this group, as he was on Mullen’s initial Starkville staff and has stayed with him ever since.
Gonzales might be the obvious pick here too, since as the likely primary play caller he’d be the drop-in replacement for everything Mullen does. I could see Hevesy getting the nod instead in order to keep Gonzales’s plate from getting too full. I don’t know that much about Knox, honestly, as he doesn’t have much of a public persona. Even as he’s one of the three Mullen lifers, he doesn’t go back to 2001 with him as Gonzales and Hevesy do. I tend to think it’d be one of those two in this strategy.
Ideally we won’t ever have to find out what the succession plan looks like. The good news from mapping this out is that Florida has a lot of options if Mullen tests positive. Between Grantham, English, Brewster, Gonzales, and Hevesy, the Gators have five options for having someone credible at the wheel, and Gonzales and Johnson give the team multiple options for the play calling aspect. No matter what happens, if UF has enough coaches available to field a team, there will be someone around who can keep the ship steady for a time.