I swear some people here make it damn hard to be Gator fans. Like I said earlier, I am not wildly excited at this hire, but given what is out there I'd just assume it be him if we can't get Kelly or Frost.
Some people seem to think that Mullen isn't smart enough not to run a 205 lb QB up the middle 25 times a game. I guess we shall see. When Leak was here, they only ran him occasionally. I recall them doing comparisons of him vs Alex Smith at Utah, and Leak's percentage of passes vs runs was higher than Alex Smith's. It is true, most of them were short passes. The offense under Leak was reasonably productive yardage wise, but my recollection sometimes got jammed up in the red zone (Having Tebow helped that). That was actually true under Zook too with Leak's prior short pass happy offense.
Did they use Leak optimally for his skill set? Probably not, but I'd say they adapted to his skills pretty well while maintaining their core scheme. I have no reason to think they won't adapt the scheme for "Matty Ice" and they won't run him up the middle a dozen times a game.
With Tebow, it wasn't uncommon to throw it down the field, often off of a play action. Now Tebow didn't throw it as often as Spurrier QB's, but his yards per attempt were above average of most of the QB's at the time as I recall.
Long term, will Mullen attract pro style or even some 190-210 lb dual threat QB's? Perhaps not, because they won't view his scheme as the matching their skills the best. But we will have to see.
And for those fans that are offended a 110 lb blonde wife of a coach said she changed her grocery shopping habits due to nagging fans, Jebus Christ grow a friggin pair. I honestly don't care what she says as long as we win games. And if there are actually fans giving the wife of a coach a hard time about sub par Saturday performances, I wouldn't blame the wife for calling them out. If nothing else, the fact that they have already experienced it, and are willing to come anyway, shows they know the drill.
And we wonder why a Chip Kelly or Scott Frost may not want to come here. But...But...TN is bad too!!!
All these board experts who know for a fact that Mullen is going to fail, and a few seem to be rooting for him and the Gators to fail. Years ago "experts" on here said they didn't want any part of Dabo Sweeney if he were available. Same for Kirby Smart. A few years ago people here were saying Rich-Rod was the answer.
I'm just going to let it play out. I don't know what is going to happen, but I am kind of happy for the change, if nothing else, and somewhat relieved that we got a respectable coach who gives us a chance to be respectable. At the end of the day he may suck, but I'll give him at least to the O/B game before I start throwing stones.