UF coach Mullen proves he can recruit

With National Signing Day now in the books, Florida Gators head coach Dan Mullen is proof positive why you can’t believe everything you hear about a coach’s reputation.

Remember the knock on Mullen for the longest time — the one that told us that he was a good coach but a bad recruiter?

In fact, the whispers for years have been that the reason Florida hired Jim McElwain instead of Mullen back in 2014 was because Mullen couldn’t recruit at a high enough level and because he was arrogant, aloof and rubbed people the wrong way.

It turns out the aloof, arrogant, rub-people-the-wrong-way guy was McElwain and not Mullen. Go figure.

In the year he’s been on the job at UF, Dan Mullen has proven that his critics couldn’t have been more wrong.

First and foremost, Mullen’s personality and approachability with both fans and media have been off the charts. He’s been as engaging and fan-friendly as any UF coach of my lifetime. He stays after press conferences and chitchats with members of the media;

he has won over UF’s fan base with his exuberance and charisma.

Of course, it has helped immensely that he hit the ground running in the fall. The Gators went from 4-7 two years ago under McElwain to 10-3 last season under Mullen, including that resounding 41-15 blowout of Michigan in the Peach Bowl. Meanwhile, Mullen made good on his promise and improved the Gators’ perennially pathetic offense from 109th in the country last year to 42nd this year — its highest ranking since Tim Tebow’s senior season a decade ago.

Mullen continued his phenomenal one-year makeover of the Gators on National Signing Day Wednesday when he and his staff swayed one recruit away from Alabama (Fort Lauderdale defensive end Khris Bogle) and another away from Georgia (top cornerback Kaiir Elam from North Palm Beach) to finish off a recruiting class that was ranked No. 9 by 247Sports — Florida’s highest-ranked class in years.

After the Gators were manhandled by the Bulldogs in Mullen’s first Florida-Georgia game in October, I asked UF’s head coach what it was going to take to get to level of the SEC’s two premier teams — Alabama and Georgia? His response: Recruiting.

“We have to recruit the way they recruit, and we will,” Mullen promised. So far, so good. I guess we should have known Mullen’s reputation as a mediocre recruiter was based mostly on the fact that he was at Mississippi State for nine years as a head coach. With all due respect to Starkville, Miss., it is not easy to lure the nation’s top prospects to a tiny, rural town in the second-poorest state in the nation.

UF athletics director Scott Stricklin is himself a Mississippi State alum and also came to Gainesville from Starkville. When he plucked Mullen from Mississippi State to be the Gators’ new head coach, the hope was that Mullen would automatically sign better classes because of UF’s obvious recruiting advantages. So far, this has proven to be true.

But don’t kid yourself, there is still much work to be done. Most of the national-recruiting rankings have Alabama No. 1 and Georgia No. 2, which means the Gators still have a lot of ground to make up. However, Mullen at least has UF moving up in weight class and getting closer to those two programs in recruiting.

“As I’ve said, we are here to build and bring back a program that competes regularly for championships, and you’ve got to have good players to do that,” Mullen said at his signing-day news conference Wednesday. “If you go back and you look at the [UF national] championships in the mid-2000s, there was an awful lot of talent on those rosters. Recruiting is a major part of that. Developing, coaching, all of that is a big part of it, too. But also you have to have the talent — and a lot of that comes from recruiting.”

Of course, one decent recruiting class doesn’t automatically mean Mullen has become an elite recruiter. Perennial contenders such as Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State stack one great recruiting class on top of another … on top of another … on top of another.

There’s an old saying among college coaches: “Recruiting is like shaving. If you don’t do it every day, you end up looking like a bum.”

Especially in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the nation’s top 12 recruiting classes resided on National Signing Day.

But give Mullen tons of credit. He is obviously recruiting/shaving at a level the Gators haven’t seen in quite some time.

On the field and on the recruiting trail, Dapper Dan has the Gators looking razor-sharp.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. on FM 96.9 and AM 740.