Honestly, I assumed he wouldn’t really answer the question.

It was the final question of an hour-long interview with former Florida and Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen. The conversation dipped into a bit of everything. How much did he enjoy broadcasting with ESPN and the freedom of the calendar that comes with it? Did he want to get back into coaching? What are we in for with that new Netflix documentary on the late 2000s Florida teams?

But there was 1 other thing I had to ask Mullen as he enters his second season away from coaching — if Marco Wilson doesn’t throw a shoe against LSU in 2020, is he still at Florida?

“Probably, yes,” Mullen told SDS on a recent episode of The Saturday Down South Podcast. “Now obviously there are so many different things that go into it, but I think there’s a chance of that being the case, which is a tough deal. And who knows … I wouldn’t picture the reason I’m not there was because of that, but I think we win that game, there’s a different mindset. How we play Alabama, how the year shakes out. We might even get into the Playoffs. We get in the Playoffs, I think we have a shot.

“That domino caused a lot of different things to happen.”

To be clear, it didn’t come across as Mullen blaming Wilson for not knowing that sending an opponent’s shoe into the sky would result in an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty and continue a drive instead of giving the ball to Florida’s No. 1 offense for a potential game-winning drive (LSU of course later went on to kick a game-winning 57-yard field goal through The Swamp fog).

What Mullen seemed to hint at was that it would’ve totally changed the perception of the close loss against Alabama in the SEC Championship. Remember that to that point, Alabama won every game by at least 15 points. Florida, with a win vs. LSU, would’ve been in the top 6 heading into that matchup vs. the Tide. If loss No. 2 had been a nail-biter against the Tide, could it have been enough to sneak past a 1-loss Notre Dame team that got clobbered by Clemson in the ACC Championship?

At the same time, A&M had already beaten Florida that year in College Station — that prompted Mullen’s infamous postgame “pack The Swamp” comment — and was sitting there with 1 loss. With more losses and without the head-to-head advantage, it’s hard to picture a scenario in which a 2-loss Florida team could have leapfrogged A&M, which was No. 5 in the final Playoff standings.

But Mullen is right that the Wilson domino caused a lot of things to happen.

Instead of potentially playing for a top-5 finish, a 3-loss Florida team went into the bowl game with opt-outs galore. The LSU debacle was the beginning of a 2-9 stretch vs. Power 5 opponents, which ultimately was Mullen’s undoing at the end of the 2021 season.

Some might argue that Mullen receiving an extension after 2020 was a sign that he was actually in better standing than what hindsight would suggest. But while Mullen got that raise after earning 3 consecutive New Year’s 6 bowl berths to start his time at Florida, the buyout remained unchanged at $12 million. That’s eventually what Scott Stricklin agreed to fork over to Mullen when he was fired at the end of a disappointing Year 4.

Under normal circumstances, perhaps Mullen’s contract situation would’ve been resolved after Year 2. After 2019, he was the first coach to ever start at a new school with 2 New Year’s 6/BCS bowl victories. But instead of that deal getting done by spring of 2020, COVID happened and universities across the country were tasked with financial challenges.

I asked Mullen about the atypical circumstances surrounding that extension not getting done prior to Year 3. His answer was about as candid as it gets.

“I don’t know. The administration at Florida is the administration at Florida, ya know?” Mullen said. “You look at it and see now they have finally maybe caught up. They finally put together a budget, it looks like. When Billy Napier came in, they finally put together a budget that competes with other teams in the SEC. They finally finished and moved into a facility where kids can actually visit campus and it’s not, ‘Hey, our meeting is in the basement of a locker room and post-practice, how do you do recovery for your team? There’s like a trash bucket with ice in the parking lot. You know what I mean?

“They actually have technology and stuff where kids show up and are like, ‘This is a good place to come.'”

Mullen is of course referring to Florida’s new $85 million football facility that was announced in 2019 and opened in August 2022 just ahead of Napier’s debut. Could Mullen have recruited better with that at his disposal? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that the recruiting was a knock against Mullen, specifically with in-state talent. During his 4 full cycles (2018-21), he signed just 5 of the 40 recruits from Florida who ranked in the top 10 in their respective classes.

Whatever the case, there clearly wasn’t alignment at critical points during Mullen’s time in Gainesville.

“I don’t know what the deal was, never getting a new contract until later and then a different type of contract post-COVID. It was always a sticking point or something,” Mullen said. “The hardest one for us going into my 4th year (2021), within the program, we knew we were going to be in kind of a rebuilding year … the facility was about to be finished to help us in recruiting with kids coming in and seeing we don’t have to walk a half-mile across campus to practice. There were so many little things.

“If you’ve ever been to Florida, they were just behind. It was like, ‘Coach (Steve) Spurrier didn’t need this in the ’90s, why does anybody today need it?’ I said, ‘Well, football has changed.'”

Life has changed for Mullen. It’s much quieter at Lake Oconee in Greensboro, Ga. He visited Paris and London this offseason, which is now a true offseason from January-August (he’s not a fan of the NCAA’s recruiting calendar). He’s locked in for another season in the studio and calling some games with ESPN, which he said he’s in no hurry to stop doing if the right coaching opportunity doesn’t present itself. He’ll soon be 2 years removed from his time in Gainesville.

He roots for his players, but no, he doesn’t root for Florida on a given fall Saturday. He doesn’t have a team anymore — his buddies from the Northeast joke with him that he needs to get back into coaching so that they can have a team to root for — but of the 2 places he got to be a head coach, there’s definitely a favorite.

“You know,” Mullen said, “if you had to associate me with coaching somewhere, you say, ‘Hey, where’s, you know, what is your school? What is your school that you coached at?’ I’d say Mississippi State. That would be the school I would claim.”