The opinion of Mullen’s work at MSU was heavily tied to who his predecessor was. Our offense looked incredibly revolutionary and competent compared to what Croom was doing, but in reality he just ran it up on bad teams and was completely awful against good teams. It was a high floor / low ceiling offensive system that never had a chance of overcoming the traditional talent gap that MSU faces most weeks in the SEC. I said this the other day, but Mullen didn’t average 20 points per game in SEC play until year 4 and only averaged about 23 offensive points per game in the SEC for his career at MSU. And he only even got that high from beating up on bad OM, UK, Vandy, and Arkansas teams.
Here’s the offensive point totals against the elites of the SEC during his tenure:
Florida (1-1) - 6, 10
Georgia (1-2) - 24, 3, 3
Alabama (0-9) - 3, 10, 7, 7, 7, 20, 6, 3, 24
LSU (2-7) - 26, 7, 6, 17, 26, 34, 19, 20, 37
Auburn (3-6) - 17, 14, 27, 28, 20, 38, 17, 14, 10
7-25 against those teams
5 of those 7 wins were over those teams in down years where they finished unranked
NEVER scored 40 offensive points against any of those teams
Only scored 30+ 3 times in 32 tries
Only scored 20+ 11 times in 32 tries
The offense simply wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. We won a lot of games on defense and recruiting on that side of the ball. Mullen the program manager was competent, but the offense was always overrated and the recruiting concerns were valid. He honestly stayed here too long for his own good….the false confidence and ego he built up from his 9 years of really not accomplishing all that much here is not serving him well at UF right now.