Mullen is a conservative play caller. If you have great o-line + Tebow, you can chip away at the D with misdirection, QB draws, then when the D sells out to stop that you burn them with the great WR's Fla had. We don't have that, in fact we are pretty far from that.
But Mullen sticks with the same...."We are going to be a spread, running team, etc....." but Russel isn't a runner and if we tried to incorporate a longer passing game RT LT got us killed, so we got a lot of Perkins up the middle with a crowded DLine, "setting up the big pass play........like Fl did" but even then we had weak receivers who couldn't break away for long routes, and we are all scratching our heads wondering what went wrong. I think some of those angry 1000 yrd stares from Mullen is him wondering what he wasn't doing right. Maybe Hud as O coordinator spread in enough screen passes, misdirections, etc to keep D's guessing. D's weren't guessing with us last year. Maybe it was Relf as a true running threat, but I think it goes deeper than that.
I hope we see some changes in recruiting....strategy....and some shakeup in the offensive play calling, however I am not holding my breath.
I think of this from a financial advisor perspective. At FLA Mullen was given a huge pile of money and he invested in conservative bonds then he said here, look at this big pile of money I made for you. At MSU we give him a little pile of money, he invests it again in bonds @ 2% return and he shows up with a little pile of money and we say...WTF, go make us some real money. We/Mullen has to expose himself to risk, take some chances if he wants to hit it big, especially against LSU, A&M and Bama. I don't think his personality type highly stubborn/controlling will allow him to do that. When Hud was our passing game coordinator or whatever it was you saw more risk & reward in our offensive strategy but you also saw Mullen screaming at him, cussing him in practice, all that jive...when he left, as he should have, our offense became more sluggish and conservative and D's are eating that **** alive. I hope it improves, but I don't really see that happening without some significant changes.