At his best, Dan Mullen is a darn-good football coach. The lingering question is: How badly does Mullen still want this?
Dan Mullen and North Carolina could be a union of two entitites that need each other.
Forget the CFP snubs and focus on bracket seeding.
Tune in to an ESPN Thursday night college football broadcast, and you’ll hear a color commentator living his best life.
It’s not just that Mullen knows X’s and O’s. He’s comfortable on camera, whether calling games or appearing on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” or on set as a studio analyst. He’s the right amount of acerbic. He’s unafraid to offer opinions or dish out some criticism. Last Thursday, Mullen raised the idea of Ohio State getting bounced from the College Football Playoff bracket if it lost to Indiana.
“Forget coaching,” the SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum said to Mullen, in response to that shot across the Buckeyes’ bow. “You need to be a talk-show host.”
The lingering question: What does Mullen truly want to be?
At 52 years old, he’s young enough to return to coaching. With 10 winning seasons in 13 years as an SEC coach, he possesses a résumé that ought to afford him another crack at it.
If Mullen wants to coach again, North Carolina’s opening makes a lot of sense, and I question whether the Tar Heels could do better than Mullen.
UNC is the only Power Four job open. Not a bad job, really. A job that ranks in the top third of the ACC.
Draw a 275-mile radius around Chapel Hill and you’ll find no shortage of talented players within that sphere. North Carolina doesn’t ooze blue-chippers like Georgia, but it’s not a talent desert, either.
With the right coach, the Tar Heels could make the College Football Playoff. Just two years ago, Mack Brown took the Tar Heels to the ACC championship game.
But, North Carolina also isn’t an SEC or Big Ten job A-listers would salivate over. Plus, no slam dunk candidate exists in this hiring cycle. So, what about the B-listers?
Tulane’s Jon Sumrall steamrolls down a path to a Power Four job, but, if he stays at Tulane and bets on himself for another season, he could be positioned for an SEC job next year, when the coaching carousel becomes more active.
Read any internet hot board, and you’ll probably find Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann and Liberty coach Jamey Chadwell on the list.
With no Power Four head coaching experience, either would offer more of a high-risk, high-reward avenue for UNC to consider.
Still, it’s hard to ignore Mullen’s accomplishments. He remains the best coach in Mississippi State history. If you watched the Bulldogs the past two seasons, you fully appreciate that Mullen took them to a bowl game eight times in a nine-year span while operating from the SEC’s death star division. Mullen coached Mississippi State to five bowl victories. No other Bulldogs coach ever won more than two bowl games.
Mullen did more with less at Mississippi State. He positioned the Bulldogs to punch above their weight class. North Carolina needs a coach like that. Mullen left Mississippi State and shot in like a comet at Florida, taking the Gators to three consecutivet New Year’s Six bowl bids before it came crashing down.
The last we saw of Mullen’s coaching, he’d spiraled from guru to goofy at Florida, while buckling under the pressure. As his final recruiting class stalled in the rankings, a perception formed that Mullen didn’t want to put in the work required to recruit to Florida’s standard.
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Another perception formed, too, that given his choice, Mullen would prefer coaching in the NFL.
In both cases, I think perception was more real than not, but the NFL never walked through Mullen’s door, and Florida showed him the door.
In the years since Mullen’s firing, he’s implied that Florida’s administration botched the opening salvo of the NIL revolution. A fair point.
The Gators firing Mullen doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be good for the Tar Heels.
North Carolina doesn’t expect to recruit at Florida’s standard. Anyway, recruiting has become less about traveling all over the country and putting in facetime with teenagers, while impersonating a car salesman and pretending to enjoy the chicken pot pie blue-chip Jimmy’s mom cooked for you.
Pair a formidable NIL collective with a sharp talent evaluator, and a coach can build a talented roster. (See Lane Kiffin’s ‘Portal King’ strategy at Mississippi.)
Mullen knows how to evaluate talent. He made his living at Mississippi State by spotting which three-stars he could get to perform like four-stars.
The question is, how hot does Mullen’s fire for coaching still burn? Does he want this enough to roll up his sleeves dig into all that comes with college football nowadays – namely, NIL dealmaking and jumping into the transfer sweepstakes?
Mullen often says he enjoys his television gig but that he’s not closed the door on a return to coaching.
“It would have to be the right head coaching opportunity for me and my family,’ Mullen said recently on “Finebaum.” ‘When you coach, you’re all in. It’s life-consuming.”
Which type of life does Mullen want?
The Tar Heels should ask him.
Here’s what else I’m mulling in this “Topp Rope” view of college football:
Snub attention will divert from true dilemma of CFP bracket
A lot of ink will be spilled and hot air emitted over which teams got snubbed from the playoff. Truth is, any team that gets left out of the field blew its chance.
The conversation for the final at-large spot currently centers on one-loss Indiana, which got blown out in its only game against a ranked opponent; two-loss Clemson, which lacks a quality win and also got blown out in its only game against an opponent currently ranked; or three-loss Alabama, which lost to Vanderbilt and got blown out by an Oklahoma squad that had lacked a pulse for two months.
That’s some bubble, eh?
Overshadowed by the snub drama will be the more relevant controversy: Which teams do the committee reward with first-round host status?
Does the committee bestow upon one-loss Notre Dame a first-round home game for thriving against a weak schedule? How much will the committee punish runners-up from the SEC and ACC? Will the Big 12 champion or the top Group of Five team receive the final bye into the quarterfinals?
Those seeding decisions wield the power to influence the playoff’s outcome much more than whether the committee chooses Indiana, Clemson or Alabama for the final spot.
Email of the week
Bill writes: In previous columns, you have all but written Billy Napier’s postmortem, and you have implied that the Florida AD didn’t have the fortitude to fire him, a decision much overdue. So now I’m wondering if you have mollified your dire assessment of the state of Florida football after Napier’s victories over LSU and Ole Miss.
My response: The Gators fared better these past two weeks. Good on ’em. Quarterback DJ Lagway shows signs of being a special talent.
Two truths on this situation:
First: Napier performed poorly as Florida’s coach for two and a half seasons and made repeated missteps during that time. Second: Napier has been a much better coach this past month. If he keeps improving, maybe he can get this thing figured out after all. Next season becomes make or break.
Three and out
1. Remarkably, Shane Beamer’s South Carolina Gamecocks remain in the playoff hunt. Picked to finish 13th in the SEC, the Gamecocks will aim to bounce Clemson from the playoff chase on Saturday while building their own case. A win would make South Carolina 9-3 against one of the nation’s toughest schedules. Still problematic for South Carolina are head-to-head losses to Alabama and Ole Miss, fellow three-loss teams.
Regardless, Beamer would make a strong choice for SEC coach of the year, especially if he topples Dabo Swinney.
2. No. 1 Oregon and No. 2 Ohio State remain on a course for a ‘three-match.’ If the Buckeyes beat Michigan, they’ll earn a rematch with the Ducks in the Big Ten championship game. The winner of the conference crown can expect the No. 1 seed, while the loser heads to the No. 5 seed. That charts a course for the third meeting between these teams in the CFP semifinals.
3. What would another chaotic Saturday look like? How about this: Vanderbilt beats Tennessee, Auburn beats Alabama and South Carolina beats Clemson. Welcome to the playoff … South Carolina or Ole Miss?!?
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. The ‘Topp Rope’ is his football column published throughout the USA TODAY Network. Subscribe to read all of his columns.