Mississippi State Football: Dan Mullen's Seat Should Be Hot, but It's Not

Sometimes in sports you see interesting phenomena that can only exist in the environment that we find them in. Change one element and all of the sudden things collapse, systems fail and, ultimately, people end up fired. Jim Grobe out of the friendly confines of Wake Forest is not existing in such a happy, expectation-free way in Lincoln, Nebraska or Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Another coach that we watched for years exist in a unique situation where he saw mild success, but was ultimately un-fireable was Greg Schiano.

Schiano took Rutgers football to heights they had never dreamed of; a couple second place finishes in the Big East, making Rutgers a perennial bowl team, taking the Scarlet Knights to six of their seven bowl trips in history and pushing them into relevancy.

Now that Schiano has taken the job leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers there is a new man set to take Schiano's place at the "we really can't fire him, can we?" table.

Dan Mullen.

That's right the head man of the Mississippi State Bulldogs is slowly growing into one of college football's unicorns. The guy in a job that is just so thirsty for some wins that as long as he keeps plugging along his employer might not notice that he isn't actually doing anything that great.

Dan Mullen is a coach that has about three things to do to keep his job and none of them are particularly difficult right now: beat Ole Miss, go to a bowl game and don't get embarrassed—on or off the field—too bad. And even the last one is judged on a sliding scale.

For all the hype surrounding Mississippi State's miracle 2010 season where the Bulldogs posted 9 wins, the truth is in Mullen's second season, Mississippi State posted their best wins over an 8-5 Florida squad. Beyond that, bad Michigan and UGA squads were the big victories of the season. In three seasons, Mullen's gone 21-17 overall, in the SEC he's 9-15 and against the SEC West Mullen is 3-12.

All three of those wins were over Ole Miss.

Yet, after all of this, Mullen still keeps the crowd hype in Starkville. He's beating Ole Miss, the Bulldogs are 2-0 in bowls under the former Florida OC and Mullen can poke at TSUN every time he wins the Egg Bowl.

How long can it last?

My colleague Barrett Sallee seems to think that Mullen's seat is going to get hot if he doesn't do something more for the Bulldogs.

But, I don't buy that. I agree Mullen's seat most definitely should be hot if he goes 1-5 against the division this year, beating Hugh Freeze in year one and no one else.

To put that another way, if you have four seasons of only beating one team in your division, you should probably get fired. At worst put on notice. Instead, Mullen draws cowbell cheers and folks get giddy for the season all the same.

Three divisional wins in three seasons is bottom of the barrel stuff. Mullen, the coach whose star was so bright just a year ago, is about to see something that's worse than the hot seat for an ambitious coach—the you-can't-get-a-step-up-job-but-you-can't-really-improve-you-stock seat.

At least on the hot seat you get fired, you go somewhere else, prove yourself and get a new gig. On this other seat you just sort of hang out there, go to a bowl that's not that great and get passed over for promotions.