Positional coaches may be on the hook for certain missteps with specific recruits, but Mullen himself is ultimately responsible for this team.
I don’t like to write, or, frankly, read articles that only serve the purpose of calling sports professionals bad at their job. Even the worst coaches and managers are usually vastly more well-versed in their respective sport than the author who decides to take potshots at them.
There’s a lot of calamity and howling that goes on about Florida’s ability (or lack thereof) to create recruiting interest within their own state or seal the deal with five-star prospects to whom they’ve been linked. However, at the end of the day, it’s not as if there’s a better coaching staff available to the Gators right now than one Dan Mullen brings to the table. The man himself is a brilliant offensive schemer, and there aren’t many better wide receiver coaches in the nation than Billy Gonzales. You have to take the good with the bad.
On the other hand, some failings can’t be ignored.
As it was pointed out in this meticulous but ultimately quite negative take from Read & Reaction on the Gators’ approach on the scouting trail, the positional coaches may be on the hook for certain missteps with specific recruits, but Mullen himself is ultimately responsible for this team. If they struggle to get traction with young talent on the whole, look to the guy who built the staff. His permissiveness towards coaches underperforming their duties is the root issue in play.
When guard Jalen Farmer, a Georgia native and 2022 recruit, committed to the Gators on Friday afternoon, it breathed new life into this frustration. Now, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Farmer as a project who can eventually be a role player in the trenches. However, it was a stark reminder of how much offensive line coach John Hevesy has struggled to bring positive attention to the Gators among the young lineman.
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It’s hard to take pride in the work Hevesy has been doing when Florida’s most recent recruiting win was to overcome (checks notes) ECU and Georgia Tech, the only other teams to offer on Farmer. That’s doubly so when stacked next to the fact that Hevesy lost out on Jacob Hood and Leyton Nelson, both of whom were made a priority, to Georgia and Central Florida respectively.
To borrow another point from Read & Reaction, the optics on how the Gators lost out on Nelson are particularly abysmal. As a late bloomer and an in-state product, he should have been an attainable target for the team. They were the final school to offer on him before his commitment to UCF. However, they had a relationship with him that went back longer than the June 16th offer date and were even able to get him on campus for some in-person work, where this recruiting staff supposedly thrives.
Instead, the way Nelson describes his interactions with the Gators is far from ideal. In an interview with SI, he called coach Hevesy “straight to the point” and that he takes football seriously. However, despite describing Hevesy’s love for football and saying that’s how things should be in the SEC, his later remarks indicated that Hevesy doesn’t know how to connect with young players.
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It doesn’t take much reading through the lines to see that Nelson didn’t enjoy being around him at all. He even went so far as to call him “scary.” Then, when Florida realized that they were going to lose out on him to UCF, he recounted Hevesy and Mullen as spamming his phone and getting “defensive” about their style.
Uh, yikes.
“At some point, we need to place the blame where it deserves to be: directly on Dan Mullen. Mullen is the guy who built this staff,” was the blunt conclusion reached by Read & Reaction. “That includes bringing in Hevesy, a guy whose limitations he should know well since he’s been with Mullen since the Bowling Green days.”
I love the way they concisely illustrated the fact that Mullen is ultimately the one to blame for his staff’s failings, but don’t think that it entirely encapsulates the scope of the problem.
Mullen’s offense makes its money on the ground. Although he’s willing to be flexible for a player like Kyle Trask, that’s the way he’s always operated when he has a choice. Being that he loves running the ball, it is paramount for him to have a rock-steady offensive line in place. That’s especially the case in the current landscape of the SEC, where he’ll have to get past the defensive powerhouses in Georgia and Alabama to accomplish anything.
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One would imagine none of this is anything Mullen doesn’t know, yet it hasn’t motivated him to do anything substantial to improve his team’s performance in recruiting offensive lineman. He’d rather be patient with his friend than do what it takes to optimize his team’s ability to play his style of football.
Again, I’m not calling for an ouster of Mullen and his staff. That’s neither reasonable nor is it realistic in light of how the program has fared under his watch and his recent long-term extension.
However, if the Gators are going to find major success on the national stage, something has to change. Namely, Mullen needs to handle his coaching staff as a true meritocracy. It’s not easy to be the bad guy. In the big chair, though, you take that responsibility. If Hevesy needs to go — and let’s be clear, Mullen is the only person who can make that choice — then he needs to make that happen.
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