They may not even realize it, but Dan Mullen and Ryan Silverfield shared a connection long before their names were linked to the Arkansas football job this year – and we’re not talking about using the same agency for representation.
At no point have the two coaches even worked in the same conference, much less on the same staff. Perhaps the closest they ever were to overlapping came in 2005.
That’s when Mullen followed Urban Meyer to Gainesville and started laying the groundwork for the Gators to eventually win a pair of national titles. Just an hour and a half northeast from there, Silverfield landed his first Division I coaching gig that year.
The man who hired a 24-year-old Silverfield to coach Jacksonville University’s quarterbacks also happened to be the same man who recruited and coached Mullen at Ursinus College, a small Division III program in Pennsylvania.
More than a decade separated Steve Gilbert’s time with both coaches and 20 years have passed since his lone season with Silverfield, but he still remembers the Razorbacks’ new head coach sharing many of the same characteristics as Mullen.
“A lot of the things that Ryan and Dan Mullen have in common is that they were both very driven, real smart, really good with people,” Gilbert told Best of Arkansas Sports. “Some of those factors I’m sure have led to both of their success in college coaching.”
Of course, he was quick to admit that he had little idea either coach would ultimately end up in college football’s toughest conference — a massive jump from DIII’s Centennial Conference and the non-scholarship Pioneer League of the FCS.
“I don’t know about head coach in the SEC because that’s a whole other level, but it hasn’t surprised me at all that he’s been successful,” Gilbert said of Silverfield. “People asked the same thing about Dan – did you think Dan was going to be as successful as he was and the head coach of Florida and Mississippi State?
“That’s a whole other ordeal. Did you know they were going to be successful? Absolutely. Did you think they were going to be successful as college coaches? Absolutely.”
The Differing Paths of Mullen and Silverfield
Dan Mullen had a much more traditional path to coaching stardom than Ryan Silverfield.
After becoming an all-conference tight end for Gilbert at Ursinus, he spent four years total as a wide receivers coach at a couple of FCS programs, Wagner and Columbia. Mullen broke into the FBS ranks as a graduate assistant, first at Syracuse and then Notre Dame. At that latter stop, he worked alongside a wide receivers coach named Urban Meyer.
That connection took him from Bowling Green to Utah to Florida, at which point he had built up enough cachet to get hired as the head coach at Mississippi State. Mullen took the Bulldogs to unprecedented heights and had three top-15 finishes at Florida, despite getting fired.
