Bruce Feldman details Dan Mullen's future at Florida

Dan Mullen and the Florida Gators have gone through the wringer this year, managing just a 5-5 record despite a preseason AP ranking of No. 13 and an AP ranking as high as No. 10.

Just weeks ago, Florida was going toe-to-toe with then-No. 1 Alabama in the waning minutes of a contest in Gainesville. Now, the story is quite different; the question, instead of whether Mullen made the right two-point conversion play call against Alabama, is whether Mullen will have much of a future at all in Florida.

FOX Sports/The Athletic college football reporter Bruce Feldman on Thursday appeared on The Paul Finebaum show to detail Mullen’s future in Florida, as well as whether the Gators might in fact choose to move on. The answer is clear as mud.

“I had heard a couple of weeks ago that he was pretty secure,” Feldman said of Mullen’s future at the helm. “Then, all of the sudden, it has been such a downwards spiral there. You had the embarrassing performance where LSU runs all over them. Then, they play South Carolina and all of the sudden it’s like, ‘Alright, as long as he doesn’t have a bad performance the rest of the way, he should be OK.’

“And they got embarrassed by South Carolina. I mean, blown out of the building. He turns around and he fires his defensive coordinator, he fires his longtime offensive line coach, and then they follow that up with a dismal performance against a 4-5 Samford team.”

As Feldman pointed out, Mullen fired two longtime assistants in offensive line coach/run game coordinator John Hevesy and defensive coordinator Todd Grantham after the abysmal loss to South Carolina. However, things only seemed to get worse from there.

Florida may have put up 70 points against Samford, but the performance is hardly impressive when considering the fact that Mullen desperately needed Emory Jones’ help after Samford’s 42-point first-half performance. Samford in that contest had its way with the Gators’ defense — and that was after Mullen fired the defensive coordinator allegedly responsible for the subpar play. Samford’s 52 points broke a record and became the highest-scoring performance by an FCS team against an FBS team in college football history, and the Bulldogs’ 42-point first half was the most Florida has ever surrendered in a half. Mullen’s defense let up 530 yards to an FCS team, and it barely snuck away with a win.

“The recruiting has never been great under Dan Mullen,” Feldman continued. “I can’t imagine it’s going to get any better given the uncertainty and just how bad they’ve looked. I don’t know how over the last two weeks — they have Missouri and FSU, those are both mediocre teams — I don’t know how badly you can beat them where the leadership at Florida goes, ‘OK, I believe this is going to go in the right direction.’ Because recruiting is obviously struggling, and the other part of this from a financial standpoint is his buyout doesn’t change after this year.

“So it’s not like, ‘Hey, we’re going to ride it out a little because it makes more sense financially.’ That part doesn’t add up. If anything, if you decide, to just stick with him for another year because we’re so invested in him, I don’t know what it does to season tickets and fans.”

Given the turnover in FBS jobs this season, Florida is in an even more difficult boat. It could fire Mullen, who in June received a three-year contract extension worth an additional $1.5 million annually, but it would then have to fend off even more schools than a typical year to find its ideal candidate.

“The question is going to be, who are you going to get?” Feldman said. “I’m not sure if they can afford to keep Dan Mullen after this year any longer, either.”

Mullen says ‘this year hasn’t gone the way we wanted it to go’ at Florida

Five wins, five losses, two assistant coach firings and a number of decommits later, Florida head coach Dan Mullen is ready to admit the obvious: this season has not gone as planned for the Gators.

Florida entered the season with high hopes in Mullen’s fourth year at the helm of the program, and understandably so — the Gators strung together a 29-9 record in his first three seasons, and they even went to the SEC Championship game last season. With that, Florida earned an AP Preseason ranking of No. 13. But as it soon became clear, perhaps Florida hadn’t done enough to earn that distinction.

“It sounds like coach talk, but every year is such a unique year with a unique team in unique circumstances that occur,” Mullen said of Florida’s disappointing 2021 campaign. “We played a very different schedule this year with a very different team and there are very different circumstances. So, it’s not like, ‘Oh, this happened.’ This year hasn’t gone the way that we’ve wanted it to go unfortunately.”

Mullen said it’s hard to compare this year’s team to successful units he’s coached in year’s past. It could be more than just the defense at fault.

“There are multiple — you can point at a lot of different things of why that happened and different reasons with where we’re at,” Mullen said. “But that’s this year’s team. And it’s hard. I can’t compare one year to the next because each team is so independent.”