After 3 years on ESPN watching college football change, Dan Mullen rolls the dice at UNLV

LAS VEGAS — On an unseasonably brisk April morning, dozens of recruits congregated in the observatory formed by the sliver of turf that splits UNLV’s practice fields in two. Outside the state-of-the-art Fertitta Football Complex, hands were stuffed into sweatpants or pouches on hoodies to stay warm as the winds whipped higher in velocity. Some staffers even wore gloves and beanies. It was all of 65 degrees.

Over the next three hours, the eyes of prospective players eventually drifted to the man in the white visor best known for his time on the sidelines in the SEC. UNLV coach Dan Mullen, his whistle often dangling out the side of his mouth, stood quiet and observant — until he was decidedly not.

When a UNLV wide receiver and cornerback squabbled in the back of the end zone during a red zone drill, Mullen bullrushed in and let everyone know there’s no time for pedestrian antics, even in the middle of this spring practice so far away from the 2025 season. He leapt into the air in frustration, mimicking the skirmish before asking every player and staffer in scarlet and gray to “cut the bullsh–!” and execute their assignments.

Mullen’s loud plea was somewhat drowned out by the rumble of yet another plane descending overhead into Sin City — one of an estimated 500 or so daily flights in and out of Harry Reid International Airport, 1.3 miles away.

It’s a fitting metaphor for the Mullen era in Las Vegas: Tourists from all over the world directly soar over the Rebels’ facility daily, primed to be entertained, to let loose, to gamble and hope to win.

Like so many of the more than 40 million visitors who come to roll the dice, the 53-year-old Mullen did the same.

He spent the past three years since being fired at Florida as a college football analyst for ESPN. He served as color analyst for Thursday night games on the road each week, flew to Bristol, Conn., to be in the studio for analysis on Friday night broadcasts, then was behind the desk Saturday, where he showcased his exuberance for football from sunup to sundown. The first flight Sunday morning to Atlanta was always the move, which got him back home near Lake Oconee, Ga., in time to rest and spend time with his family.

Life was good, and life was relaxing — the decompression someone as high octane as Mullen needed after his stint with the Gators eventually flopped following nine years at Mississippi State. Mullen concurred that if the right job hadn’t present itself, he could’ve been at ESPN for another 20 years. That’s how much he enjoyed TV.

“We were kind of set for what we were looking for in life,” Mullen said. “It wasn’t something we were chasing.”

In a city where winners shine, the prospect of being part of another in Vegas was too tantalizing to pass up. Spotted from Mullen’s office, yet another plane descended, slicing through the one-of-a-kind backdrop of the Las Vegas Strip as nearby palm trees outside the massive windows danced about in the blustery winds.

“I’ve always thought,” Mullen said, “this could be a sleeping giant here.”

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In early December, the wobbly dominoes that needed to fall to get Mullen back into coaching began toppling. Two days after former UNLV coach Barry Odom led the Rebels to a second straight Mountain West Conference title game, he was announced as head coach at Purdue.

UNLV athletic director Erick Harper sat in his office inside the Thomas & Mack Center with his administrative team compiling a short list of coaches. Dan Mullen was atop it. Harper soon pitched the idea on a golf course in the community Mullen now lives in, and four days later, Mullen called to say he was in. Mullen signed a five-year, $17.5 million contract on Dec. 12.

“I watch ESPN every day,” Harper said. “You could see the passion of football was still in him — it was just a matter of whether or not he wanted to do it again.”

Mullen toiled with that conundrum for much of the past three years.

The 17 straight years working in the pressure-cooked SEC took a toll, culminating in his firing as Florida’s head coach in November 2021 near the end of a 6-7 season.

Mullen had returned to Florida in 2018 as head coach, aiming to continue the success of his first round with the Gators, winning two BCS national championships as offensive coordinator under Urban Meyer. He left behind the program he’d built at Mississippi State, where he became a head coach for the first time in 2009 and went 69-46, taking the Bulldogs to a No. 1 ranking in 2014.

He went 29-9 in his first three years at UF and 34-15 overall, but was often criticized by the fan base for not recruiting to the levels needed to be a consistent contender. Often brash and unapologetic, Mullen got the Gators to within an onside kick of beating eventual undefeated 2020 national champion Alabama in the SEC title game. No other team in the country went blow-for-blow with the Crimson Tide like the Gators that year, Mullen’s team lost 52-46.

“We had a national championship team that year,” Mullen said in retrospect.

But he also riled up his fan base by rueing the size of the crowds at The Swamp in the middle of the pandemic, jawed with Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz and leaned into the Halloween spirit in October 2020 by attending the postgame news conference dressed as the ultimate villain, Darth Vader. Mullen said while the 2020 season was his most talented team at Florida, playing a college football season in the middle of a pandemic was the most taxing of his life. The 41-17 win over Missouri on Halloween night that year was the program’s first game in three weeks after an outbreak of COVID-19 forced the program to shutter.

Vader Mullen was an attempt, he said, to remind his players that football is supposed to be and can be fun, even with once-in-a-lifetime stresses percolating. A little more than a year later, Mullen was out. Florida paid the remaining $12 million on his contract that, five months prior, was extended by Gators athletic director Scott Stricklin.

Does Mullen have regrets about how his Florida tenure ended?

“Regret is an interesting word,” he said. “I don’t like how it ended. I didn’t know whether I was going to get back into coaching. I’m in a much better headspace than where I was when I left Florida. I feel very fortunate that I get to maybe rewrite the ending. I don’t like the current ending.”

It wasn’t going to take a lot of money or guarantees to even consider coaching again: A familiar flame had to be ignited deep inside him.

“When you’re in the SEC for as long as I was, you get to where it feels like everything is life and death,” Mullen said. “(Football) doesn’t need to consume every second of your life. The neat thing about being in this town is people will make you feel that way. They’ve said, ‘So excited for you, good luck, we’re pulling for you.’ In Florida, it was like, ‘Hey, you better win.’ In the SEC, if you win, it’s like, ‘Hey, good job.’ If you lose, it’s like you walked into someone’s house and kicked their dog.”

Mullen exhaled and took a few seconds to answer if the joy of coaching had vanished entirely at the end of 2021.

“It was becoming a job,” he said. “It was hard. If I had stayed at Florida, I don’t know if I would still be coaching today.”

The split was acrimonious, but still, his office is littered with highlights of his time at Florida, Mississippi State, Utah and other stops. Mullen does not want to erase the past. Without it, he wouldn’t be in the same patented visor scheming up plays. Instead, he is thankful that his step back came when it did.

During production meetings with coaches in recent years, Mullen said he saw coaches look as deflated as ever as the confluence of name, image and likeness and the transfer portal allowed for tumultuous roster turnover. Opting not to name names, Mullen said several well-known coaches told him they wished they had his job. Rather than being thrust further into the ongoing change, Mullen analyzed it all in real time in front of a camera.

“I didn’t have to go through the transition on a daily basis and just get beaten down by it,” Mullen said. “I had a coach call me and say, ‘Wait until you develop a kid for two years, and one day he walks into your office and demands money or says I’m gone. It’s hard to even function, Dan.’ Now, if I accept that as a reality before I get back in, I’m mentally prepared for it all. And it starts with: ‘Why do you want to leave?’”

Mullen says he does not fault any player who may stroll into his office and say Team-X offered money to move. Every player’s situation is unique. Mullen said one of the tenets of his UNLV Rebels is to avoid attrition. He believes the program currently has the financial backing from donors to keep it that way.

“How do we make this run like a big-time program on the budget we have?” he said. “The benefit I’ve had in my coaching career is I played D-III ball. I’ve coached (FCS) football. I’ve coached in the Ivy League. I’ve coached at the highest level, like Florida, and I’ve coached at Mississippi State, where you don’t have the same budget as everybody else. So, how am I competing against people I’m competing against?”

Mullen relies on his history of developing star talents like Alex Smith, Tim Tebow, Dak Prescott and Anthony Richardson to help sell the football side of the conversation before the NIL component comes into play.

Since his hiring, UNLV has landed 36 transfers in the portal, according to 247Sports, highlighted by former Michigan quarterback Alex Orji and former Virginia quarterback Anthony Colandrea. Orji split time as Michigan’s starter last season. Colandrea arrives as a more seasoned starter after two years at Virginia.

One of the newcomers is a player first introduced to Mullen when he was in eighth grade: outside linebacker Chief Borders, who signed with UNLV in January. Borders went to Florida to play for Mullen, but transferred to Nebraska in 2023 and then Pitt in 2024. When he found out Mullen was taking the UNLV job, he reached out to his old coach.

“Scratch everything else,” Borders said. “I’m going out the same way I came in. That’s with coach Mullen. He’s evolved. My coach hasn’t stopped growing, because he’s taken it up a notch from where he was to where he is now.”

One of Mullen’s oldest friends, longtime NFL defensive coordinator Paul Guenther, opted to join him. The two played together at Division III Ursinus College, roughly an hour north of Philadelphia, in the early 1990s and were roommates for three years in college.

Originally hired to be the safeties coach, Guenther accepted the defensive coordinator position this spring after former Mississippi State coach Zach Arnett resigned for personal reasons.

Guenther said Mullen’s time at ESPN not only helped him recharge his coaching batteries, but also allowed him to get an outsider’s perspective at how other programs are run all over the country.

“He’s energized, I think he sees that this thing can be a really unique opportunity,” Guenther said. “And that’s why I’m here, too.”

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It takes Mullen exactly 16 minutes to get from his new home south of the hubbub of The Strip to his personalized parking spot outside the football complex.

He took his daughter, Breelyn, to see Carrie Underwood for her 13th birthday. He’s seen Darius Rucker in concert. He’s cranked the siren at a Las Vegas Golden Knights hockey game. And he’s already been in touch with friend and country music icon Kenny Chesney, who has a 15-show residency this summer at The Sphere, about having use of the football complex gym. Chesney, Mullen deadpanned, “has been fingerprinted and everything” so that he has unfettered access.

Only in Vegas.

It’s a city where everything you could possibly want is at your fingertips. Not to mention it’s in the middle of a professional sports boom, soon adding Major League Baseball’s former Oakland Athletics to a mix including the NHL’s Golden Knights, WNBA’s Aces, and, of course, the NFL’s Raiders. UNLV plays its home games inside Allegiant Stadium, home of the Raiders. The success Odom cultivated at UNLV in such a short time was one of the many reasons Mullen even considered leaving life in front of the camera at ESPN.

If he was going to have a coaching revival, it was going to be at a school that had the structure to succeed. It starts with the facility he called better than any home base he’s had, even in the SEC. The Rebels have won 19 combined games the past two years and have been on the doorstep of winning a MWC title outright in consecutive years, only to come up short against the conference’s alpha, Boise State.

Great energy, great attitude, & great football. pic.twitter.com/ZAbWFLDLtK

— UNLV Football (@unlvfootball) April 24, 2025

As Mullen put it, he’s taking over a team that was one game away from the College Football Playoff a year ago.

“This city’s waking up to big-time college football,” Mullen said. “If you’ve never experienced big-time college football, which up until recently the city of Las Vegas has not, you don’t know what you’re missing. The one thing we can have in this city is a lot of support.”

Harper said UNLV football has already sold more season tickets through the first four months of 2025 than it had in all of 2024, when the school averaged 38,393 fans per home game. He credits Mullen’s willingness to engage in a community filled with existing or potential deep-pocketed donors. Mullen’s been out to golf tournaments, mingled with fans at concerts and hockey games and met Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, the only person to give him the “you better win” speech. Lombardo has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UNLV.

UNLV is banking on Mullen’s gregarious nature and spread offense, which has ranked in the top 10 nationally, to propel the program to heights not yet reached. That would help put a dent in a hefty athletic department deficit, estimated between $26 million to $31 million. Harper drew headlines when he said UNLV could fund only the first two years of Mullen’s contract, before the university walked that back.

UNLV is expected to receive between $19 million and $24.8 million from the Mountain West Conference for agreeing to stay when five other schools left for the Pac-12 beginning in 2026. It will need it, as revenue sharing is expected to come to college sports with the House v. NCAA settlement.

Mullen and Harper declined to get into the specifics of what UNLV’s NIL budget looks like — UNLV’s NIL collective, Friends of UNLV, declined to comment. Quarterback Matthew Sluka left in the middle of last season amid an NIL dispute.

At a Nevada Board of Regents meeting in March, Harper and other UNLV officials were asked how the university can alleviate financial issues. Harper said it’s simple: Just win.

“We definitely want to be in the upper echelon of the G5, but also we have to be the best we can possibly be,” he said. “The same challenge with every institution in the country is always going to be financial. That’s just the matter of the business. To weather the storm, the best way to generate more revenue is to win, and win at a high level consistently.”

In a town like Vegas, all it takes is one breakthrough season to change fortunes. The definition of a breakthrough would be an MWC title and likely the automatic Group of 5 berth to the Playoff.

The expectations are suddenly higher than ever for UNLV football. It’s precisely what Mullen needed a break from after Florida, but it’s also what he knows will help the Rebels get to the promised land.

“I want to create that kind of passion here in this city,” he said. “I want to create that frenzy that then puts all the pressure right back on me.”

(Photo courtesy of UNLV Athletics)

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