Understandably, Bill Belichick has dominated headlines around college football after accepting the head coaching position at the University of North Carolina on Wednesday. But yet another head coach turned media personality seems poised to return to the coaching ranks.
According to John Brice of Football Scoop, ESPN analyst Dan Mullen and UNLV are “in deep discussions and working to finalize a deal” for him to become the new head coach of the program, though no deal has officially been reached at this point.
UNLV profiled to be one of the better head coaching vacancies in college football after Barry Odom departed from the program on Sunday to take the vacancy at Purdue. Odom left the UNLV program in a far better spot than he found it, finishing with a 19-8 record in his two seasons in Las Vegas. It didn’t take long for UNLV to work toward filling their vacancy after Odom’s departure.
Mullen is best known to the college football world for his time at Mississippi State from 2009-2017, and at Florida from 2018-2021, where he led the program to an 11-2 record and an Orange Bowl victory.
Since then, Mullen has been a prominent figure on ESPN’s college football coverage, working as both a studio analyst and a color analyst in the booth for the network during the past three seasons. This season, he has served alongside Matt Barrie, a role he has admitted he enjoys perhaps even more than coaching.
However, it seems like similarly to Bill Belichick, Mullen’s itch to return to coaching outweighed his enjoyment in the broadcast booth.
This isn’t anything new. At the end of last season, Mullen was rumored to have interest in a number of head coaching vacancies, including at Syracuse and his former Mississippi State program.
If the remainder of the negotiation process goes to plan and Mullen does indeed end up as the next UNLV head coach, he will look to capitalize on the success that Odom had at the program. UNLV finished the regular season ranked inside the Top 25 of the CFP Rankings with a 10-3 record.
