(Photo from Wikipedia.org)
Earlier this week, SEC Internet enjoyed reading about Dan Mullen’s “clever trolling” of Georgia. This comes on the heels of his other countless jabs at and statements against Georgia in the offseason, and of course who can forget the infamous “blind squirrel” comment from a year or so ago?
Never mind the fact that Georgia soundly defeated his program two years in a row. Never mind the fact that players are committing to Georgia just a few days after recruiting visits to Florida. Never mind the fact that Georgia has actually won the SEC more recently than 2009 and that the Dawgs appear to still be the early favorites to win the East in this upcoming season.
Mullen is having his fun and trying to crawl under Georgia’s skin in the offseason. After all, the Cocktail Party is one of the SEC’s most enduring rivalries. It’s a game that includes division and national implications quite frequently. It’s a heated game between two traditional powers, so the environment surrounding this game has always been pretty wild.
Still…what’s this guy’s problem?
What Mullen doesn’t seem to understand is that verbal jabs like this only really work when your team is on top. If your team is the lesser entity at the time, such behavior just makes you look sad and pathetic.
I’ll grant that Mullen is a good coach and he seems to have the Gators moving in the right direction, but he’s not yet reached that pinnacle. He’s not yet gotten to the point where he has earned the right to trash talk anyone, much less the Georgia team that embarrassed him on the field two years in a row.
Keep in mind, the 2017 Dawgs nearly shut out his vaunted Mississippi State offense just a week after what could have been the biggest win of his career up to that point.
So fresh off of that loss, Mullen decides to insult the team that just blasted his “Bizarro-Dawgs.” Because disparaging a team that was obviously better than your team makes your team look…better…by comparison?
If I can take a slight logical leap, here, it seems like Mullen has a bit of a hang-up when it comes to Georgia. He’s got issues.
Now it wouldn’t be anything new for a coach to take umbrage with a rival team. Urban Meyer (jerk) famously said how much the 2007 Cocktail Party stuck in his craw, where Georgia danced in the end zone.
While it does come off as extremely pretentious for Meyer to say something about himself in the third person, and while he clearly doesn’t have his priorities in order (again…jerk), I can at least understand Meyer’s deal with the Dawgs.
When Will Muschamp was at Florida, he famously said, “I have no regard for Georgia,” which was not a smart thing to say about his alma mater, but I can also understand the logic behind that statement to a degree. He needed to distance himself as an alum of his new job’s greatest in-conference rival.
Of course all of this is ignoring the greatest Bulldog Hater of all time in Steve Spurrier. We know what Spurrier’s deal with Georgia was. He was bitter about that 1966 loss to Georgia as a player that cost his Florida team an SEC championship and an undefeated season.
Did you know that Florida has never had an undefeated season? That’s crazy.
So Spurrier, Meyer, and Muschamp all had good reasons to bash Georgia or whine about Georgia or do whatever it was that they did.
It still isn’t wise for a coach to play into that sort of thing, but I can at least see why those three guys were so outspoken.
Mullen, on the other hand, makes zero sense to me. What is his problem?
Is it just coaching? Is he just trying to get his team focused on the Georgia game? Is he trying to make the fans endear themselves to him?
Apparently the spring game attendance number thing is an old hobby of Mullen’s. He thinks it’s funny. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal if it were the only thing.
But how often do you hear coaches talk about how their players shouldn’t give the opposing team billboard material? That’s such a key thing to teams during the season, and here you have a guy like Mullen just blatantly calling out a rival that is seemingly head and shoulders better than his team right now.
It’s all just a distraction. Of course, it isn’t the worst distraction (NSFW…sorta) that Florida football has had in the last couple years.
To further illustrate my point, I don’t think this shtick is just for show, either. I think Mullen really does have a burning disdain for the Dawgs. And I think it comes out in his coaching.
You don’t have to be a super fan to remember Georgia’s first offensive play from scrimmage against Mississippi State in 2017. That beautiful flea-flicker from Nick Chubb to Jake Fromm to Terry Godwin that opened up the game was a dime, and it set the tone the rest of the way. The Bizarro-Dawgs were out of it right then, even if it took them approximately 57 minutes and 20 seconds to know for sure.
The Flea Flicker is at 2:05 in this video. Amazingly, you can’t really find any highlight videos with just that clip. Odd.
Now fast forward about 13 months and look at the very first play that Mullen calls for Florida in the 2018 Cocktail Party. This is his first offensive playcall against Georgia in the rivalry series and what does he choose to do?
A flea flicker. And his quarterback doesn’t complete it.
It’s not exactly a stretch to say that Feleipe Franks is a couple steps behind Jake Fromm when it comes to passing the ball. Even though Franks has made incredible strides under Mullen’s leadership, he still isn’t as good as Fromm. And he just isn’t precise enough to reliably make this play.
When I asserted back in the fall that Mullen made this call specifically in order to “pay Georgia back,” I was met with quite a bit of disagreement from Georgia fans and Florida fans. Still, I have no doubt in my mind that this call was more than just a standard trick play. It was a message.
Unfortunately for Florida, the message that they broadcast was, “We’re not as good as you.”
The coach’s job is to put his players and his team in the best position to win. I don’t believe that putting Franks in that position was wise, and if Mullen did indeed make that call as part of some personal vendetta, then he cost his team a play and possibly a game with unwise decision-making.
But none of this answers the question of why. Why is Mullen so inordinately obsessed with Georgia?
It could go back to the 2017 flea flicker, I suppose, but that was hardly a personal decision. Prior to that game, there was no bad blood between Kirby Smart and Mullen, as far as I know.
Mullen didn’t lose a perfect season to the Dawgs in 1966. He isn’t an alum trying to cozy up to his new team.
The only thing I can figure is that, like Meyer, Mullen still has a bit of a sore spot when it comes to the 2007 edition of the Cocktail Party. He was Meyer’s right-hand man at the time, and perhaps Meyer’s tense-altering anger rubbed off on Mullen a bit.
Or maybe Mullen is just trying to be like his mentor in another way, and he’s just generally adopting a petty attitude when it comes to baiting rivals.
There are unsubstantiated rumors that Mullen was actually Georgia Athletics Director Greg McGarity’s first choice for the football opening at the end of the 2015 season before key donors stepped in and urged him to hire Smart instead, but I have no proof for that other than pure rumor. It’s possible that this is the cause of his disdain, but I doubt it.
It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where the nut is here. (Photo from Twitter)
I should also mention that Tech’s new head man, Geoff Collins, is in Mullen’s coaching tree. So if the NATS’ antics looked familiar, then now you know where they got them from.
Either way, Mullen still hasn’t learned the number one lesson involved in playing this kind of mind game: You have to actually be good at it.
Who knows? Maybe the Gators will make a drastic turnaround this year and actually challenge Georgia for the division. Perhaps Mullen really will become the answer at head coach for the Gators and end this downward spiral they’ve been engaged in for the better part of this decade. Maybe one day he’ll figure out a taunt or joke that’s actually funny and doesn’t backfire on him in a hilariously predictable sort of way.
After all, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.