Dan Mullen teases Florida football over struggles since firing him

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It has been a rough four years in the Swamp since Florida fired former football coach Dan Mullen.

Mullen posted double-digit-win seasons in 2018 and 2019 during his time in Gainesville and had the Gators on the cusp of a College Football Playoff bid in 2020. However, after a 5-6 start in 2021, Mullen was abruptly fired despite his 34-15 overall record.

Florida proceeded to hire Billy Napier, whose own tenure lasted just four years, included only one winning season and ended with a losing record overall — the first UF coach to do so since World War II. Mullen, meanwhile, enters his second season at UNLV after a successful 10-4 debut campaign.

During an appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show, Mullen took the opportunity to throw a bit of shade toward his former school.

“We won a lot of games,” Mullen said, per On3's Nick Schultz. “But you know what? In today’s world, when you’re at premier schools, you expect to win. At Florida, they expect championships. I was at Florida as an assistant coach who won two national titles. That’s the standard. That was the standard when I got there. We got to an SEC championship game, fell a couple points short to Alabama. But our standard from the day I got there was championships. We weren’t able to come through, even though we fell a couple points short on winning the SEC Championship and going to compete for national championships.

“And I think maybe if the Playoff era was around, I think three out of my four years, we would have made the College Football Playoff. Maybe that would have looked a little bit different back then with the resume, of keeping me around a little bit longer to try to go win that national title. But hey, it is what it is. Probably hasn’t gone as well there since I left, it doesn’t seem like.”

Mullen certainly has some leg to stand on here. Florida participated in the New Year's Six in each of his first three seasons and, if a 12-team playoff existed at the time, almost certainly would have earned a bid all three years. Especially given the nadir the program reached under Napier, it's hard to argue that firing Mullen proved to be a net negative.

With that being said, it's also important to remember the context of Mullen's dismissal at Florida in 2021. UF entered 2021 ranked in the top 15 but had a stretch in which it lost five of seven games, leading to Mullen's dismissal. There was also reason to be skeptical about the program's trajectory, given lackluster recruiting results and Mullen's notorious refusal to discuss them.

There doesn't seem to be much regret among the Gator Nation about moving on from Mullen when they did, but he's certainly right about the fact that what came after never matched the highs of his tenure.

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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: Dan Mullen teases Florida football over struggles since firing him

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