Dan Mullen entered his fourth season in charge of the Florida program in a strange spot for a coach who had just taken his team to the SEC Championship Game and come up six points short of juggernaut Alabama, who went on to win the national title.
On the surface, Mullen's job was about as safe as they come.
Working for the same athletics director he spent six years working for at Mississippi State, Mullen had led the offensive turnaround so many Florida fans had desperately craved coming off seven years of absolutely-brutal-to-watch offense under former head coaches Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain. He'd gotten the Gators back to Atlanta, this time actually arriving with a team capable of making it a game. The former Muschamp wasn't capable of, the latter McElwain wasn't.
Yet there were signs that things weren't as peachy as they seemed. Even Mullen would likely admit that. This is what he said this week after shutting off media access to his other coaches and players in an attempt to allow the team to regroup behind closed doors following a 4-4 start to the season, fighting off the outside noise and negativity surrounding the program:
"The perception is everything’s perfect or everything’s horrendous," Mullen said. "Reality, we’re probably more in the middle somewhere and you’re just trying to figure out how to improve and get better. I always tell our guys when it seems to be going good it’s probably not as good as everyone perceives it to be. There’s probably some issues we need to go fix. When it’s going bad it’s probably not as bad as it’s going and we just have a couple things, we have areas we've got to improve in."
So if the end result in 2020 was an SEC title game appearance and that reality was a touch too good to be true, what were the underlying things that weren't as good as they seemed that needed to be fixed?
Ask any Florida fan and you'll get a pretty quick answer: defensive coordinator Todd Grantham.
Grantham had just finished a campaign that saw Florida's defense give up more points per game than any UF team since 1917. Yet Mullen opted to stick with Grantham, retaining him for another season, the final one on his current contract.
That led many fans, pundits and analysts to a relatively simple conclusion. By hitching his wagon to Grantham, Mullen shifted the spotlight if things continued to go wrong from Grantham onto himself.
As Swamp247 wrote following last year's debacle against LSU, "Mullen seems to have a major issue to address on that side of the ball going forward. Florida may not reach its full potential under Mullen if it isn't. Will the Florida coach be willing to hold himself to the same Gator standard of excellence he so regularly touts?"
Suffice it to say, introspection has not exactly been a strength for Mullen during his Florida tenure.
He just has trouble getting out of his own way at times, evidenced by several pretty public PR gaffes over the last year ("pack the Swamp" comments after a Texas A&M loss in front of a COVID-19-sized crowd, a sideline-clearing incident against Missouri that the SEC had to fine Mullen $25,000 for, an awful answer to a pretty innocuous recruiting question earlier this week, etc.).
Given the opportunity to take definitive action on what looked like a definite problem, Mullen mostly stood pat. He took the minimalist approach to fixing the issue, instead parting ways with two assistant coaches in the secondary.
Here's a fact: If the truth is somewhere in the middle of reality and perception, Mullen had better hope the team's current skid ends in a huge hurry.
Because after a 40-17 loss to a South Carolina team featuring a first-year coach and a third-string quarterback on Saturday night as an 18-point favorite, there's no telling how low the reality might end up sinking. Perception is Florida is in freefall. And the high mark is an SEC title game appearance that came during an 8-4 season.
The midpoint of that?
Spoiler: Not nearly good enough at a place like Florida.
The way this season is playing out will shift the spotlight one step further up the chain. Mullen shifted it from Grantham to himself by backing his defensive coordinator after 2020. Athletics director Scott Stricklin will face a similar decision with Mullen after 2021 at this rate.
Here's another dose of reality: Grantham's defense wasn't the only thing that needed to be looked at closely and fixed following the 2020 season.
Recruiting, that touchy subject for Mullen, has also been slowly turning into a major problem for Florida. It's one that has been there from the start but has slowly been allowed to become a bigger and bigger one thanks to insufficient action and Band-Aid fixes.
If you need evidence of the recruiting issues going back a couple years, look no further than Florida's current defensive tackles. There are three graduate transfers playing major snaps this year. That's a direct result of poor recruiting in the 2018 and 2019 recruiting classes at that position that left the Gators without any real experience there heading into this season.
Dial the recruiting microscope out to a bigger-picture view and the trend gets more concerning.
Florida's recruiting classes have dipped from ninth in 2019 and 2020 to 12th in 2021. This year's class? It's currently sitting at No. 22 nationally, good for just ninth in the SEC, behind five programs that appear on UF's schedule every season (and six that are on next year's schedule).
So if Florida's having problems now, exposed by programs that fans have every right to expect to beat like Kentucky and South Carolina, how exactly are those problems going to suddenly be fixed simply by parting ways with Grantham?
Stricklin has a tough decision to make, but that's what they pay these guys for. Mullen makes $7.6 million a year to make those hard decisions. Stricklin doesn't make that much ($1 million per year), but his job essentially hinges around one thing: having the right head football coach.
Make no mistake about it: Stricklin has got a decision to make right now. After the 2021 season. Because if he keeps Mullen around for 2022 that spotlight is on Stricklin and he's already sitting in a pretty unfavorable light, having overseen the recent extension of a women's basketball coach who abruptly resigned only a few months after signing that extension, with reports later emerging that there had been troubling allegations of abuse reported to Stricklin dating back to the start of that coach's tenure.
But the hard decision now might not be quite as hard as it seems. That is, if Stricklin has the fortitude to take a long, hard, introspective look at the program.
He won't get a better opportunity to pull the plug on what appears to many to be a lost cause.
Mullen will be owed a $12 million buyout if he's fired, but that figure ranks just eighth in the SEC. His buyout ranks 31st nationally, according to figures compiled by USA Today.
Meanwhile, Florida's six highest-paid assistant coaches are on contracts that currently end after the 2021 season.
To fix the issues in the program, Mullen will inevitably have to make changes to his coaching staff. Hiring coaches is hard when the perception is that the head coach is on the hot seat. You're looking at multi-year contracts to attract the kind of quality candidates you need to fix things, which makes it even tougher to pull the plug down the road.
Those six assistant coaches currently make $4.23 million. Sign new coaches to comparable multi-year deals and you're talking upward of $6-7 million easily in potential assistant coach buyouts added to Mullen's buyout figure if the Gators see more of the same in 2022 and opt to part ways with Mullen then.
Stricklin needs to look no further than his predecessor at Florida for advice.
"What should be done eventually must be done immediately," former Florida athletics director Jeremy Foley once said.
Foley said that about Ron Zook, who was unceremoniously dumped midway through his third season back in 2004. Florida's next coach? Urban Meyer. A pair of national titles followed.
Simply firing Mullen sure won't guarantee that same result at Florida this time around.
Foley learned that when his next two hires after Meyer -- Muschamp and McElwain -- were complete busts. It's hard to hire high-level FBS football coaches. It's especially hard in a world where Nick Saban runs the sport and a handful of others dominate and hoard the top recruits.
Is it possible Mullen eventually figures it out and wins big at Florida if he makes sweeping changes, including to his defense and his overall recruiting approach? Sure. Just like it was possible the Gators would be fine on defense keeping Grantham around and making only minor fixes around him.
The odds, and the evidence since, strongly suggested that was a low-percentage play.
Mullen made the easy choice, retaining his underperforming subordinate and hoping for the best. If Stricklin takes the same path, he'll be making the same choice Mullen was.
Risking his own job by taking the easy path.
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