Gators fired former coach Dan Mullen one year ago today
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It’s been a full calendar year since the Gators fired former Florida football coach Dan Mullen in his fourth season at the helm.
UF athletic director Scott Stricklin parted ways with Mullen on Nov. 21, 2021, the day after his team’s 24-23 overtime loss at Missouri. That upset dropped the Gators to 2-9 against Power 5 opponents dating back to 2020, including four straight losses.
Mullen, who is now an ESPN analyst, posted a 34-15 record at Florida, including double-digit wins in his first two seasons and an Eastern division title in his third. A year removed from the SEC Championship Game, UF went 5-6 under Mullen last fall and was winless in SEC road games for the first time since 1986.
“This is a place that you should be able to have a high level of sustained success over a consistent period of time. And to do that, you have to have a lot of little things in place. People look at losses as a cause to get rid of a coach, but a lot of times, the losses or things that don’t go right on the field, those are symptoms of other issues,” Stricklin said of the decision.
“I’m not going to get into all that because I don’t think that’s fair to everyone involved. But there are a lot of little things that you had to pay attention to. And we have an opportunity here to go get someone who can really focus on those things.”
A week after moving on from Mullen, Stricklin hired his replacement in Louisiana’s Billy Napier, Florida’s fourth head coach in eight seasons. He inherited a 6-7 team with “issues”, as Stricklin described, and his first year has been a rollercoaster.
Napier became the first coach in program history to beat a ranked team in his coaching debut, a 29-26 win over then-No. 7 Utah. He won SEC games against Missouri, Texas A&M and South Carolina, but suffered a shocking loss at Vanderbilt and also lost to Kentucky, Tennessee, LSU and Georgia.
It’s clear UF is going through a rebuild that will require more time and talent. Fortunately, some of the best players on the roster were added by Napier and his staff, and the Gators currently have a top-10 class for 2023.
Florida needs to close out the regular season with a win at rival Florida State, hit the transfer portal hard and try to finish with a top-5 class, something Mullen never signed in Gainesville.
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