It may already be too late for Dan Mullen's proposal to work, but the former Florida State head coach presented the idea to Gators athletic director Scott Stricklin after being fired in 2021.
He had hoped the Gators would acquire Lane Kiffin as his replacement from Ole Miss, where Kiffin had just finished a 10-3 season, but the Gators instead opted to hire Billy Napier, just three weeks into his third season with the team, kicking off an era that has recently been heading toward a point of no return.
“The funny thing is, when I got fired at Florida a few years ago, they asked me, and I said, 'Hey, I want to go hire Lane Kiffin right now,'” Mullen said. Currently appearing on “The Zach Gelb Show” I said this earlier this week: “'If you fire me, hire Lane Kiffin right now from Ole Miss.' He's got a little bit of that. At Florida, it's about scoring. He's going to continue to be a scoring offense.”
“He's coming in with a guy like Anthony Richardson. We have a top-five draft pick at quarterback, so the team is in good form offensively in that regard. We've got some quality receivers committed and on the roster, so I thought he was a good fit for the team from the get-go.”
Mullen, who has not returned to coaching since being fired at Florida State and has worked as a college football analyst for ESPN since 2022, went 5-6 in 2021 and was fired with one game remaining in the season.
Before the season ended, Florida hired Louisiana-born head coach Billy Napier, whose first regular season with the Gators ended with a .500 record and an appearance in the Las Vegas Bowl, where the team lost.
But since then, they've gone 6-9 heading into Saturday's game against Mississippi State, and Florida is coming off a 33-20 loss to Texas A&M last week.
“We can't keep thinking about should have done, could have done, if only, what if,” Napier told reporters this week. “At the end of the day, I think we owe it to our players and to the university leadership to do our best to play well this week. That's all we can control. Anything else is a waste of time.”
If the Gators were to relocate from Napier, they would have to search for their fifth coach since the 2014 season.
But it may be tough for the Gators to pry Kiffin away from the Rebels, who are 3-0 heading into their game against Georgia Southern, ranked No. 5 in the latest Associated Press poll.
“He's now led Ole Miss to a potential playoff berth,” Mullen said of Kiffin and Florida, “so I don't know if that's something that would interest him. In the coaching profession, you never know why someone makes the decisions they make.”
“They will have their own personal reasons and other reasons, but I think two or three years ago, he probably would have accepted the job if it had been offered to him.”
