Dan Mullen's rise at Miss. State has Philly fingerprints
Mike Jensen, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Last updated: Friday, October 17, 2014, 1:08 AM
Posted: Thursday, October 16, 2014, 5:59 PM
STARKVILLE, Miss. - The first time his father made the trip for
a spring football game, Mississippi State head coach Dan Mullen
warned him about the drive, that it would be a rural one from the
airport in Jackson up to Starkville. Mullen told him it would be
like traveling in the hills of Pennsylvania "past the Main
Line."
The 42-year-old coach of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, the
improbable top-ranked college football team in the nation - after
the fastest rise to the top in the history of the sport, from
unranked to No. 1 in six games - is a Drexel Hill native and
Ursinus College graduate. Offering his local credentials, Mullen
immediately touts personal cheesesteak-grilling expertise (except
he can't get the right bread in Mississippi) and summers in Sea
Isle and Avalon, including a teenage summer working on the Sea Isle
City beach patrol.
Mullen's family moved from Drexel Hill to New Hampshire when he
was 4 years old, and even that resulted in a tie back to
Philadelphia.
When Mullen was looking for his first coaching job, he asked for
and received a recommendation from a young assistant coach at the
University of New Hampshire - a guy by the name of Chip Kelly. That
landed Mullen an interview with Wagner College, where he began his
own coaching ascent.
At that point, Mullen said, he hadn't met the now-Eagles coach,
but they were both from Manchester, N.H., "where everybody kind of
knows of everybody." Kelly, nine years older, had coached at Johns
Hopkins for a season while Mullen played tight end at Centennial
Conference rival Ursinus.
"My friend's older brother played with him and all that, so I got
in touch with him," Mullen said Tuesday after a Mississippi State
practice.
Mullen's own father is a 1966 Penn State graduate - "he's got blue
and white sheets on his bed," Mullen said.
When Bill O'Brien got the job as Nittany Lions head coach, Mullen
had been rumored as a candidate. ESPN even reported at one point in
2011 that he was Penn State's top target.
"I was kind of hoping Penn State would call him," Bob Mullen said
of his son. "He said, 'Dad, it's really going to be bad.' "
He was referring to possible sanctions against Penn State, and
those words proved prophetic. For his part, Bob Mullen remains a
diehard. He wants all the facts to come out in the Jerry Sandusky
scandal but makes it clear that he is still a Joe Paterno fan. He
has a T-shirt that says, "Thanks Coach for all you did."
A booster at Mississippi State, realizing the father's Penn State
background, once told Bob Mullen, "We want Dan to be our Joe Pa."
Mullen added, "Maybe he will."
Of his son, Bob Mullen said, "He's a good guy, and he's a
basically happy guy. He's upbeat, very positive."
Northerner in the South
A former Florida offensive coordinator under Urban Meyer, Dan
Mullen can have a needling side that took some getting used to in
SEC country, even in Starkville. In addition to winning games, he
aims to win news conferences.
"He's a Northerner in the South," said Larry Johnson, who runs the
Touch of Love Barber and Beauty Salon just down Highway 182 from
Mississippi State's campus. "It's a clash of cultures. I keep it
real. I feel like he's arrogant."
Is that a bad thing for a football coach in the toughest division
of the sport's most hypercompetitive conference?
"It's a good thing," Johnson said, but added, "You've got to
win."
There is excitement right now, of course. Sitting in the
barbershop, Eric "Big E" Williams wore a new Bulldogs shirt, tag
still attached. It was a gift, he said, from his girlfriend, a
Mississippi State student. He had moved up from Meridian to be with
her. "My girl, she's a Bulldog to the heart," Williams said.
Get outside Starkville and life gets authentically rural quickly.
Heading toward Mississippi State from a northeast direction, from
Muscle Shoals, Ala., a cotton field ignores the state line. Across
the street a rusted iron sign in front of an old barn announces
that Mississippi Welcomes You. Farther on, two dogs separately lie
on the two-lane road. A gas station offers a boiled-peanuts special
and the package store next door suggests you buy Wild Turkey and
honey. If there's one store in town, it may be a Dollar
General.
Starkville is a typical-enough college town, though, and
Mississippi State's campus has every one of the big state school
bells and whistles. Its athletic complex competes toe-for-toe with
the big boys, fueled by the television money that has flowed into
the SEC. Just past a man-made pond, the Phillies would envy the
Palmeiro Center baseball complex. The right comparison for the
football practice facility next door is the NovaCare Complex.
This top ranking means the most, Mullen said, probably to the
people of Mississippi. (Mullen did not point out that Ole Miss also
is undefeated, already has beaten Alabama, and is ranked No.
3.)
"I think there are a lot of rankings and polls," Mullen said,
referring to other areas of life. "For the people of Mississippi to
say we're No. 1 in something that's really, really important to us,
football - I think that's really neat and that's really
special."
In addition to all the exposure, last week's Sports Illustrated
cover and guest spots on shows like ESPN's Pardon the Interruption,
success brings pressure. Mullen needed late-season nail-biters
against Arkansas and Ole Miss in 2013 to ensure a 7-6 season and
his own job security. The father of two admits that it seems as if
he's always either being mentioned as a candidate for perceived
bigger jobs or in danger of losing his own.
Nobody in the barbershop or anywhere else saw this season coming.
"No. . . . No . . . No," they said. The rise was fueled by three
straight victories over top-10 opponents - at No. 8 LSU, then home
wins over No. 6 Texas A&M and No. 2 Auburn. Quarterback Dak
Prescott, a Louisiana native attracted to Mississippi State by
Mullen's work at Florida with Prescott idol Tim Tebow, is
considered the Heisman Trophy favorite.
"That was big," Prescott said last week after a practice,
referring to Mullen recruiting him. "I wanted to play like Tebow. I
looked up to him and his playing style."
Mullen's task now that he's on top, he joked, is "to make sure
it's not the fastest fall." The Bulldogs still have trips to No. 7
Alabama and No. 3 Ole Miss, and traps before then against Kentucky
and Arkansas.
"When we need things to happen, they happen," Mullen said, summing
up the season so far.
Mullen looks his part, coming in from practice wearing his shorts,
sweatshirt and visor, a whistle and Sharpie hanging from his neck.
He refers to their Four Steps in the Plan to Win, which sounds like
something out of the Urban Meyer handbook.
Always sunny at Ursinus
But Mullen also still can remember his 18-year-old self, how a
65-degree day in February in Collegeville was key in his decision
to go to Ursinus. He also was recruited by Ithaca College, he said,
but it snowed on his trip to Upstate New York. "In my mind, it was
always sunny and beautiful at Ursinus College," Mullen said.
On his recruiting visit, the high school quarterback was shown
around by a lineman not much bigger than him, he said. He told
himself that meant he could play there.
"That was a dumb thought," Mullen said. "I should have thought,
'I'm probably going to get killed.' "
At Trinity High School in New Hampshire, his team had won the 1988
state title, but Mullen said, "I wasn't highly recruited. I made up
for my slow speed with my weak arm."
What he was really good at was handing off. An important skill
since Trinity ran the T formation. "He was a magician," his father
said. "He was so good at handing off the ball, you didn't know who
had it."
At Ursinus, Mullen was converted to tight end and started his last
two seasons. He may now be coaching the top-ranked team, making
over $3 million a year, but his father still points out that Mullen
made first team all-Centennial Conference as a senior.
Bob Mullen grew up in Drexel Hill, on the 700 block of Windermere
Avenue. After graduating from Penn State and a stint in the Air
Force, he got married and bought a house on the 300 block of
Windermere Avenue, on the other side of the cemetery, just down
from Monsignor Bonner and Archbishop Prendergast High Schools. Dan
Mullen was born at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Relatives
lived in Aston and Glen Mills.
Bob Mullen worked as a color-separation process salesman for a
company out of Chester. The family moved to Manchester when he took
a job for a company headquartered there. His line of work was made
obsolete, he said, by digital cameras.
Although the Chip Kelly tie was just a simple favor for another
local guy, "Chip came to see me at Florida when he left UNH for
Oregon. When he took over [as head coach] at Oregon, I wanted to go
out there and see how he was running practice."
Mullen had hitched his own wagon to Urban Meyer. After stints at
Wagner, Columbia, and Syracuse, Mullen worked as a graduate
assistant at Notre Dame, where Meyer was on the staff. When Meyer
got the Bowling Green head job, he hired Mullen, who followed him
to Utah and Florida.
Back to the Chip Kelly tie: None other than Nike head (and Oregon
main booster) Phil Knight once said an Oregon assistant was sent to
study Meyer's offense at Florida. ". . . and the offensive
coordinator for Florida was Dan Mullen . . . Anyway, [Mullen's]
from New Hampshire. And he says, 'The guy who really knows this
stuff is Chip Kelly up at the University of New Hampshire.' So
[Oregon offensive coordinator Gary] Crowton, when he came back he
had some rough edges to the spread and he started calling Chip
Kelly on Sundays saying, 'This came up and I didn't quite know what
to do with it.' And Chip always had an answer. So, when LSU came
and picked up Crowton, [Mike] Bellotti knew he'd been talking to
Chip Kelly, so he went to get Chip Kelly."
It's a good tale, and maybe parts of it are even true, but for his
part, Mullen denies that he had even an indirect role in Kelly's
ending up at Oregon, that Crowton had worked at UNH and knew Kelly
independently.
Did Kelly text him when he hit the top spot in the rankings?
"He doesn't text much," Mullen said. "Usually I get calls from
Chip around the draft, around the combine. Very much like me. I
guess I'm bad that way. If I need something or you need something,
I'm there for you."
Mullen did point out that Paul Guenther, now defensive coordinator
of the Cincinnati Bengals, was an Ursinus teammate and lived right
across the hall from him at their fraternity house. And Mississippi
State tight ends coach Scott Sallach also was Class of '94 at
Ursinus playing for Steve Gilbert. Sallach had never worked with
Mullen before he was hired by him in 2009 after stints at Dartmouth
and Princeton.
There was no master plan for any of this back at the frat house in
Collegeville.
"A couple of guys were able to get into coaching right afterwards
and we didn't even know what you could do with that," Mullen
said.
He added, "As it turns out, we were able to do a lot."
mjensen@phillynews.com
@jensenoffcampus
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