When prompted, head coach Dan Mullen gave a shockingly genuine and well-considered response to what’s going on in our country.
Speaking to the media on Thursday, Gators coach Dan Mullen was asked a question that didn’t involve football. It didn’t involve the logistics of practice, and it didn’t involve the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.
Instead, Mullen was asked about Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old Black man who was shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, Wis., but survived, albeit paralyzed from the waist down. The shooting sparked intense protests in Kenosha this week.
When faced with questions about issues that extend beyond the scope of the gridiron, especially when those questions address complex social issues, coaches often respond in one of two ways.
They either feign ignorance of the issue, offering some cliche about team unity and focusing on the game, or they provide vague platitudes that aren’t specific or targeted enough to potentially upset their (often conservative) fanbase.
Mullen did neither of those things. When prompted, he gave a shockingly genuine and well-considered response to what’s going on in our country. He did so with a level of sincerity and degree of introspection almost never seen from highly paid college coaches.
He talked about his own experience, and how he’s educated himself on the struggle of Black Americans for equal treatment under the law and equity within society.
“When Black Lives Matter come out and then people want to fight and say all lives matter, right? You look at that and say, ‘ok, yeah I can see how that makes sense.’ Then you go educate yourself and go back and think about different things. Someone wrote an article, I read it somehwere, when the Boston Marathon bombing came out and the Boston Strong shirts came out, right? Well why isn’t everybody strong? Why does it only have to be Boston that gets to be strong, right? Of course all lives do matter but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about this specific situation where we’re seeing racial injustices happen. We’re trying to draw light to that. We’re not trying to say other things aren’t important. We’re trying to draw light to this. When you can draw on things from a lot of examples, like people all of a sudden want to jump and say I have to be on a side now, just educate yourself. What we’re trying to do is educate ourselves about the social injustices that are happening. It doesn’t mean, when you say Black lives matter it doesn’t mean I’m forgetting about other people…”
In an era where college coaches are painfully tight-lipped when it comes to expressing opinions that extend outside their purview, this amount of candor from Mullen on how his opinions have changed is fairly remarkable.
That’s not to say Mullen’s statement was perfect. It was very clear he was walking on eggshells to avoid saying anything too controversial. For example, according to a tweet from the Gainesville Sun’s Graham Hall, Mullen said in the wake of the Blake shooting, it’s important to “educate ignorant people.”
But Mullen’s lack of specificity in describing the beliefs he’s condemning could allow someone who holds them to feel unchallenged, as Alex Kirshner, formerly of Banner Society, points out here.
However, I generally disagree with Kirshner’s criticisms of Mullen. Were his comments PR-laundered? Certainly. Could he have been stronger in his stating his beliefs? Sure.
But to get hung up on this kind of coachspeak, which is ubiquitous in college sports, misses the forest for the trees.
The fact is, Mullen’s statement is stronger than those of almost any of his peers.
Compare Mullen’s comments on the necessity of keeping an open mind and educating yourself with comments from other coaches.
Coaches like Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, who provided justification in June for assistant coach Danny Pearman using the N-word at practice.
“I would fire a coach immediately if he called a player an N-word. No questions asked,” Swinney said Monday. “That did not happen. Absolutely did not happen. It has not happened. Coach Pearman was correcting D.J., and another player was talking to D.J., or D.J. was yelling at the player, and D.J. said something he probably shouldn’t have said. He said, ‘I blocked the wrong f—ing N-word,’ and Coach Pearman thought he was saying it to him, and he’s mad, and he reacted, and in correcting him, he repeated the phrase.
“And [Pearman] said, ‘We don’t say we blocked the wrong f—ing N-word.’ And he repeated it. He shouldn’t have done that. There’s no excuse for even saying that. But there is a big difference. He did not call someone an N-word.”
Or Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, who wore a t-shirt for One America News, a far-right news outlet whose anchors have been critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, with one going as far as to call it a “farce.”
Gundy later apologized, saying he was “disgusted” when he learned the network’s position on Black Lives Matter, though he had praised the content of the network months prior.
Mullen, on the other hand, demonstrated an open mind towards these issues and even hinted at evidence of personal growth, though his lack of specificity made it hard to gauge exactly how far he’s come on the issue of racial justice.
Still, Mullen jumped into an uncomfortable arena and handled it gracefully. As a man tasked with leading young men, many of whom are Black, he deserves credit for that.
That isn’t to say his work here is done. For Mullen’s words of affirmation for the cause to ring true, it would help to see more pointed criticism toward the model of amateurism, which exploits college football’s primarily Black player base for profit.
But for the time being, Mullen’s comments should provide an example for coaches around the country on how to publicly address the issues of racial equality. And if more people in Mullen’s position followed suit, it could help lead to change in this country.
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