Florida Football: Coach Mullen may turn things around for the Gators

It seems that new Florida football head coach Dan Mullen is going to bring a much-needed dose of discipline to the beleaguered crew in Gainesville.

Last season, University of Florida football held a record–as one of the three most penalized teams in the SEC. If the team had been awesome it would have been overlooked as par for the course, but the Gators had a terrible season in 2017.

Florida has been struggling on offense, and with the referees. The Gators have been one of the NCAA’s most notorious culprits–Florida averages 700 penalty yards in a season. They haven’t been winning citizenship awards off the field, either. The team leads the country in players with multiple arrests, and the debit-card debacle in 2017 kept key players off the field all season long. I’d love to say that this was the only reason that Florida finished 2017 with a 4-7 record, but the team hasn’t really had a solid offensive line in years.

Dan Mullen is looking to turn around all of these negative trends. At this point, the Gators have nowhere else to go but up, and Mullen is headed in the right direction from a coaching standpoint. He has gotten some serious upgrades to the offensive coaching staff. He has also changed to a spread system that should help shore up the weak spots in the Gator line.

Mullen’s changes should manifest in a marked improvement in the Gators’ 2018 season, but where Mullen is really making an impact is in team discipline. In addition to drilling his team on fundamentals, Mullen isn’t letting them off the hook in their schoolwork, either. Like most new coaches, Mullen is trying to establish a higher standard and a new culture at Florida; in this case, a culture of accountability.

As spring practice began, Mullen had his players running sprints–called “gassers”–in practice as punishment for several players being late to class. In an interview with Yahoo Sports, Mullen stated,

"Yeah, they weren’t real happy. That was pretty simple, that was about going to class. I don’t control that, they control that. If you’re late for class, everybody that’s late for a class would run a gasser for it. If they don’t wanna run gassers, then show up on time for class and we don’t run gassers."

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Mullen is giving the media better access and allowing the fans to interact with the players more. His energy and enthusiasm are infectious; according to ChompChat, the players are improving in the weight room and on the practice field. If he can keep his players out of the courtroom, Mullen will have done more for that program in a few short months than his predecessor did in years.

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