Let’s rewind the clocks back to November 7, 2020.
The Florida Gators, being coached by former championship-winning offensive coordinator Dan Mullen, just knocked off bitter rival Georgia to take a stranglehold of the SEC East.
It’s the first time in four seasons that the Gators have gotten the best of the Bulldogs, and if they can just hold serve against a relatively weak back half of their schedule, they will stamp their tickets to Atlanta to take on the Alabama Crimson Tide for a chance to make the College Football Playoff for the first time in program history.
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Just over a year later, the Gators would fire Mullen, kickstarting a coaching search that would ultimately lead them to Louisiana head coach Billy Napier.
How did it all go so wrong so fast?
Mullen has some theories, and he shared his insight while discussing the end of his Florida tenure with Paul Finebaum earlier this week.
“We won a lot of games,” Mullen said. “But you know what? In today’s world, when you’re when you’re at premier schools, you expect to win. At Florida, they expect championships… that’s the standard.”
He’s not wrong.
Florida has hired seven coaches since 1990, and without counting their newest hire, Jon Sumrall, who doesn’t even have a single game as a Gator under his belt, every coach who has failed to win a national or SEC championship in Gainesville has been shown the door.
That includes Mullen, who was 34-15 at the time of his firing.
A nearly 70% winning percentage hardly seems like a fireable offense, but as Mullen said, the goal is to win championships at Florida.
Florida head coach Dan Mullen walks with his team to the field prior to an NCAA college football game against Missouri, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, in Columbia, Mo. (AP Photo/L.G. Patterson)
“We got to an SEC championship game, fell a couple points short to Alabama,” said Mullen. “But our standard from the day I got there was championships. We weren’t able to come through, even though we fell a couple points short on on winning the SEC Championship, and going to compete for national championships.
“And I think maybe if the Playoff era was around, I think three out of my four years, we would have made the College Football Playoff. Maybe that would have looked a little bit different back then with the resume, of keeping me around a little bit longer to try to try to go win that national title. But hey, it is what it is. Probably hasn’t gone as well there since I left, it doesn’t seem like.”
That last line is the kicker, and reveals just how much resentment Mullen still holds for his former employer.
Once again, Mullen isn’t entirely wrong when he says Florida is worse off without him, and he’s also spot on when he says they would have made a 12-team Playoff each of his first three seasons.
But Mullen also wasn’t fired for his first three seasons. He was fired for what was coming in the next three seasons.
I mentioned at the start of the article that Mullen and the Gators were waltzing to the SEC Championship Game a little over a year before he was fired, but what happened in between the 2020 Georgia win and an overtime loss to Missouri in 2021 that led to his ousting?
Well, there’s the infamous “Shoe Game,” in which the Gators lost at home as a nearly three touchdown favorite against LSU, thanks in large part to cornerback Marco Wilson launching a Tigers player’s shoe 20 yards downfield after a third down stop in a tie ball game.
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Dec 28, 2022; Memphis, TN, USA; ESPN analyst Dan Mullen looks on prior to the 2022 Liberty Bowl between the Kansas Jayhawks and the Arkansas Razorbacks at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. (Nelson Chenault-USA TODAY Sports)
Mullen made him a team captain the very next week for the SEC title game against Bama, highlighting a lack of accountability that would ultimately doom the former Gators head coach.
From the loss to LSU until his firing in 2021, Mullen went 2-9 against Power 5 opponents, not exactly a sign of things trending in the right direction.
Things weren’t much better off the field, either, as Mullen’s recruiting classes steadily dipped after each passing season, culminating in a class that was ranked outside the top-20 at the time of his firing.
It would have been the worst recruiting class for a sitting Florida coach since they started tracking those things back in the early 2000s, which includes coaches like Jim McElwain and Ron Zook.
Those guys aren’t remembered too fondly in Gainesville and that’s company no Florida coach wants to be associated with.
But, if we are being honest, cracks were starting to form in the Mullen regime long before his ill-fated 2021 season.
2020 is looked back on as a season that could have been for the Gators, but it had nothing to do with the offense.
That side of the ball was rocking and rolling, averaging nearly 40 points per game and featuring future NFL draft picks like quarterback Kyle Trask, wide receiver Kadarius Toney, and tight end Kyle Pitts.
FILE – Florida tight end Kyle Pitts (84) catches a pass in front of Kentucky defensive back Brandin Echols for a 2-yard touchdown on a pass play during the second half of an NCAA college football game in Gainesville, Fla., in this Saturday, Nov. 28, 2020, file photo. No. 6 Florida doesn’t really even try to run the ball anymore. There’s an occasional handoff here and there, but the Gators are mostly one-dimensional _ and that’s fine with coach Dan Mullen, Heisman Trophy front-runner Kyle Trask and arguably the deepest receiving corps in the country.
As it turns out, football is about more than just offense, and the defense was downright putrid in 2020, giving up nearly 31 points per game and ranking 83rd in the country in total defense.
Mullen had the chance to make a change following the season, but chose to keep defensive coordinator Todd Grantham employed, and it’s here that we find another fatal flaw with Mullen’s time at Florida: loyalty.
Loyalty, in and of itself, is an admirable quality to have, but as a football coach, when it’s time to let someone go, it doesn’t matter how close you are to them personally.
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Guys like Grantham and offensive line coach John Hevesy continued to underperform both on the field and on the recruiting trail season after season, but they were never let go until athletic director Scott Stricklin forced Mullen’s hand in late 2021, mere weeks before Mullen himself was fired.
Translation: Mullen anchored himself to his buddies, and they ultimately ended up sinking him.
Mullen’s point about Florida making an extended College Football Playoff each of his three full seasons there is well taken, but I’m reminded of his own words echoing in my ears about the standard being championships.
Yes, the Gators would have been squarely in the CFP in 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Then what?
For those who aren’t aware, Dan Mullen was 4-7 against top 10 teams during his tenure at Florida, and while that isn’t James Franklin levels of abysmal, it does highlight that a 12-team Playoff likely would have gone similarly for Mullen than it did for Franklin.
Statistically, Mullen had less than a 50/50 shot of beating a “Playoff-caliber team” while coaching the Gators, meaning once he got to the big dance, odds are he would have petered out before even reaching the semifinals.
I could go on and on about why Mullen is misguided at best in his attempts to whitewash his tenure at Florida, but I’ll leave you with this.
As a Gator fan, I have constantly heard people during the Billy Napier era crow about how wrong Florida was to have ever fired Mullen, and I wince in anger every time.
Not because they’re correct, but because of how off they really are.
Firing Dan Mullen in 2021 was the right move for all the reasons I listed above, and then some.
Firing Dan Mullen to hire an incompetent coach like Napier was the wrong move.
That’s the long and short of it.
Being a better coach than Billy Napier, who was statistically the worst Florida has had since World War II, is a low bar to clear.
Programs with championship aspirations, as Mullen so deftly pointed out, shouldn’t be scared of pulling the plug on someone who can’t get over the hump.
Stop letting “good” be the enemy of “great.”
The SEC Championship logo painted on the field prior to the SEC Championship game between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on December 2, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Todd Kirkland/Getty Images)
Georgia famously fired Mark Richt following the 2015 season, a season in which the Bulldogs won ten games.
Richt was a two-time SEC champion, had six seasons in which he finished in the AP top-ten, and compiled a 145-51 record.
By most conceivable metrics, Richt was infinitely more successful than Mullen as a head coach, yet the Bulldogs jettisoned him for failing to live up to the championship expectations of a program like Georgia.
Mind you, Georgia had not won a national championship in 35 years at that point, more than double the “drought” that Florida was going through when they pulled the plug on Mullen.
Yet, no one chastises Georgia for this because they ended up hiring Kirby Smart, a coach who has taken them to heights even the most optimistic Bulldog fan likely couldn’t have dreamed of.
Florida fired their “Mark Richt” but failed to hire their “Kirby Smart.”
It happens to every program in America that has expectations similar to that of a Florida or Georgia (hello, Penn State).
I will say it again: Florida was correct in firing Dan Mullen.
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The fact that they whiffed on his immediate predecessor doesn’t change that, and I will stand on that hill for the rest of time.
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