Strong fall finish helps deliver positive spring for Mississippi State
STARKVILLE, Miss. — Dan Mullen was never on the hot seat last season, not with the people who mattered most. As much as Mississippi State fans had grown frustrated by the program's apparent plateau, as loudly as they fretted about their rival Ole Miss' success on National Signing Day, the reality was that Mullen's boss understood far more about the cyclical nature of most college programs and how successful his overall tenure has been than to make a knee-jerk decision over one rough stretch.
Regardless of whether Mississippi State made a bowl game last season, Mullen wasn't going to get fired.
"What people on the outside seemed to perceive wasn't really the case," athletics director Scott Stricklin told USA TODAY Sports.
For coaches, however, job security doesn't always equate with quality of life. And often the difference between the two can be smallest of margins.
Nowhere in the country did the offseason mood of a program and its fan base change more over one game — and really, one play — than it did at Mississippi State this winter.
When the Bulldogs upset Ole Miss last Thanksgiving night, winning 17-10 in overtime on a gutsy fourth-down call by Mullen, it didn't just send Mississippi State to its fourth consecutive bowl game. It set the tone for an offseason in which Mullen's accomplishments, not his program's perceived shortcomings, were at the forefront of any conversation about the future.
Now, coming off what Mullen called the best spring since he arrived in 2009, he's eager to see if the deeper, more experienced Bulldogs can take the next step into SEC title contention.
"I didn't come here to just build a respectable program," said Mullen, who parlayed his offensive success under Urban Meyer at Florida into an SEC head coaching job at age 36. "We came here to build a championship program and do something that hasn't been done before. That's the challenge I keep pushing myself for."
There are few better examples of the modern pressure on power conference coaches and schizophrenic nature of fan bases in the Twitter/message board era than the trajectory of Mullen's career at Mississippi State.
Despite a losing record in Mullen's first season, Stricklin used to joke that Mississippi State had the "happiest 5-7 fan base in America" because the team had been surprisingly competitive in the SEC and ended the year with a three-touchdown victory over Cotton Bowl-bound Ole Miss.
By the end of 2012, however, Mississippi State had gone from having college football's happiest 5-7 fan base to perhaps its edgiest 8-5 fan base. As the Bulldogs squandered a 7-0 start, the narrative was not about Mullen taking them to three consecutive bowl games, which had only been done once before in program history. Rather, the focus was Mullen's 2-14 record against SEC West heavyweights LSU, Alabama, Auburn and Arkansas and why the program couldn't meet suddenly higher expectations.
"When I got hired it was like, 'If we can go to a bowl once in a while that would be a great deal,' " Mullen said. "Now it's, 'What bowl game are we going to this year coach? Can we get to a better one? When are we winning the championship? We've changed the expectations here."
But the rough finish to 2012 came at a particularly complicated time. Not only had the school had just committed to raising $100 million to build an indoor practice facility and fund a stadium expansion, meaning more seats to fill and donors to please, but Ole Miss had suddenly become the SEC's shiny new toy under Hugh Freeze with an innovative offense and a top-10 recruiting class.
When Freeze handed Mullen his first Egg Bowl loss, the perception was that Ole Miss was rising and the Bulldogs had stagnated. In a small state where the two programs have rarely been good at the same time, a shakeup in the pecking order has often led directly to a coaching change.
And with Mississippi State starting 4-6 last season with just one SEC win (against woeful Kentucky), the quick-twitch rumor mill started churning — a mere two years after Mullen had been a hot candidate for every elite job opening in the country.
"It's a heck of a business when it's based on the decisions of 18- to 22-year-olds and the emotions of 100,000 alumni. There's a lot of things beyond your control there," Stricklin said. "We were 4-6, and there was unrest. That's why it's really important to evaluate your coaches and the way your program is being operated and run on a day-to-bay basis and understand what Dan's trying to get done. I have to have that comfort level and I did even though the results weren't what we wanted it to be."
Without those assurances from Stricklin, would Mullen have been brave enough to turn down a short field goal in overtime against Ole Miss and instead let quarterback Dak Prescott — who missed the previous two games and didn't practice all week because of an elbow injury — run the ball on fourth-and-1, which turned into the eventual winning touchdown?
No matter where he stood with the fan base, Mullen said it was worth the risk to put the game in the hands of his quarterback and All-American left guard Gabe Jackson. But it was a decision that carried huge consequences.
Had the play not worked, it would've made for a miserable offseason with an entire summer narrative building around Mullen's job status. Instead, Mississippi State carried a bit of a bounce into the spring, touting its first three-game winning streak to end a season since 1974 and the possibility of fielding its most complete team in Mullen's tenure.
"That was the most important thing about this team was it gave us the momentum to go into this offeseason with the mindset we can do anything," Prescott said. "We didn't necessarily feel like our record showed the character of our team, and battling out of that 4-6 (hole) was about staying focused and knowing we could perform to our level of ability."
There's a lot to like about what the Bulldogs have heading into the fall. Prescott brings stability and is more of a well-rounded talent than Mullen has ever had at quarterback. There's legitimate SEC depth on defense and star power in sophomore nose tackle Chris Jones. Six of the top seven receivers return.
But until Mullen starts picking off an elite team every now and then, it will be hard to escape the SEC's middle tier. Even after four consecutive bowl games and a 4-1 record against Ole Miss, both of which buck the historical trends at Mississippi State, the standards are now higher.
"Dan welcomes that," Stricklin said. "It's just part of it. The more success you have, the more expectations change and your margin for the point you can land and your fans be happy with it becomes more narrow."
Hitting that sweet spot has rarely been more difficult than in the SEC West in the last few years given Auburn's resurgence, the addition of Texas A&M and Ole Miss stockpiling talent. With Mississippi State also going all-in on football, expanding its stadium by 6,000 seats and adding 22 luxury boxes, Stricklin plans to be in that conversation, too.
If Mullen doesn't deliver, he knows the euphoria of beating Ole Miss last season won't last long.
"My standards are extremely high, but that just comes with the business in the Southeastern Conference," he said. "You expect it. It just shows how far we've come that people are wondering when we're going to win championships."
