Dan Mullen is already making friends at Florida
Georgia was really, really good in 2017, as we know. So good, in fact, were those Bulldogs that they're indirectly responsible for placing Dan Mullen at Florida.
The Bulldogs crushed Florida 42-7 in Jacksonville on Oct. 28. Jim McElwain was out after two-and-a-half seasons as Florida's coach on Oct. 29. Georgia also thumped Mullen's Mississippi State team 31-3 on Sept. 23; a week after beating LSU by 30, it was yet another reminder for Mullen how much lower his ceiling at Mississippi State was than that of a true contender.
Combine those two things and you get new Florida head coach Dan Mullen.
Mullen's first Florida class was ranked in the teens by the recruiting services, which, for a coach pulling together a class after two months on the job and in the first year of the December signing period, isn't bad at all.
But Georgia's class was ranked No. 1 by all three services. A 26-man behemoth, Georgia's class included an insane eight 5-stars, finishing just 16 points shy of tying the all-time record in the Rivals scoring system while also ranking as the fourth-best class in Rivals history on a pound-for-pound basis. None of the three USC classes that beat out Georgia's 4.19 star average signed more than 18 players; the Bulldogs' class was nearly 50 percent larger than that.
All told, you could build an argument that Georgia's 2018 class is the greatest recruiting haul of the Internet era -- all while coming thisclose to winning the 2017 national title.
Given those factors, you might want to lay low if you were Florida's first-year head coach, right? Isn't that how alligators hunt in the wild, concealing themselves underwater and leaving their prey unaware of their presence until it's too late?
That apparently isn't how Mullen plans to hunt down Georgia for SEC East supremacy.
"Listen, winning one SEC Championship Game doesn't make you a dominant program, you know what I'm saying?" Mullen, laughing, said at Signing Day booster event, according Gator Bait. "In two of the last three years, we've been to the SEC Championship Game. So even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while."
Let the games begin.
