A recent history of SEC coaches who were fired after losing to Mizzou football
Bryan Harsin is on the hotseat. That much is certain.
After surviving an investigation that could have ended his tenure at Auburn during the offseason, things have begun to go poorly for his Tigers. Prior to the season Harsin had tried to minimize the impact of the scrutiny on his job security.
"We're focused on bigger and better things," Harsin said at SEC Media Days in July. "Like I said, this has brought our team closer. It's made us, in my opinion, a much stronger football team and program. That will continue."
Auburn dropped its last game 40-12 against Penn State, which instantly put Harsin on firing watch for this week. Now he seems to be trying to ignore the elephant in the room, at least publicly.
When asked whether the matchup with Missouri was a must-win, Auburn's coach was evasive.
"I would categorize every Saturday as a must-win," Harsin said during his weekly press conference. "I don't really have an answer for you there. Yes. All right? And anytime you ask me that from this point on, yes."
Auburn is favored in its home game against Missouri, which has unceremoniously helped send several coaches packing since joining the SEC for the 2012 season. In a plot twist, if Harsin does get fired after a loss to MU, it would be at the hands of Eli Drinkwitz, who worked for Harsin previously and has praised him throughout the week.
Harsin kept Drinkwitz at Arkansas State before the 2013 season after taking over for Gus Malzahn, who had left for the Auburn head job.
"I’m very appreciative to him for that and will always be indebted to him and the opportunity he gave me and my family to stay in college football," Drinkwitz said. "I have a lot of respect for him as a football coach and as a person.”
All told, four coaches have been sent to a farm upstate immediately after playing the Tigers, plus a few who bit the dust soon thereafter, including Tennessee’s Derek Dooley and Kentucky’s Joker Phillips.
Here are the stories of some of the coaches who have seen their tenures end at the hands of Missouri.
Dan Mullen
Mullen joined the Gators after a successful nine-year run as the head coach at Mississippi State. Florida was thrilled to have him after a 4-7 season in 2017 under Jim McElwain.
During Mullen's UF tenure, the Gators looked good at times, certainly improved over the McElwain era. However, he never took them to the elite level they were reaching during the Urban Meyer era.
By 2021, after he refused to make major changes to his defensive coaching staff, Mullen’s welcome in Gainesville had worn thin. Enter Missouri.
After the 2020 season, when they lost to Florida 41-17 at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, the Tigers were no great fans of Mullen. The two teams fought during halftime of that game, and afterward, Mullen showed up for the press conference donning a Darth Vader mask.
By the time the 2021 rematch rolled around, Mullen was already in trouble, entering the game with a 5-5 record that included losses to LSU and South Carolina. What happened in Columbia didn’t help his cause.
The game went into overtime after Mullen and the Gators had the ball with 1:04 left in regulation, then opted to run three times and punt. Florida got the ball first, scored a touchdown and added an extra point.
When Missouri got the ball, it answered the touchdown on a 13-yard score by running back Tyler Badie. Then, Drinkwitz opted to go for two and quarterback Connor Bazelak, under duress, lofted a pass into the end zone, where Daniel Parker Jr. caught it to give the Tigers the win.
After that game, Drinkwitz had his chance to return fire against Mullen, flipping up his hood and waving a toy lightsaber at the press conference.
“May the force be with you,” Drinkwitz said.
Mullen was fired the day after the game, with Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin noting his lack of sustained success. At the time of his firing, the Gators had lost four consecutive games against Power Five opponents.
Mullen was given the choice as to whether he would coach the final game of the season. He declined.
"Obviously we want somebody going forward who can come in here and they share our high expectations for sustained success," Stricklin said in press conference following the firing. "And can do so at a place with great resources like the University of Florida."
Mullen now works as an analyst for ESPN.
Derek Mason
Vanderbilt is a hard job to succeed at for anyone. It’s especially difficult to follow the one coach in recent memory who has found any sort of success at the SEC’s most academically and least athletically prestigious institution.
Derek Mason found himself in that position when he replaced current Penn State coach James Franklin as the Commodores’ head coach in 2014. Mason joined Vanderbilt after working as defensive coordinator at Stanford, a school with similar challenges to VU.
The peak of his tenure in Nashville likely came in 2016, when the Commodores went to the Independence Bowl and finished the season 6-7. After that, Mason’s teams saw regression, making one more bowl appearance in 2018.
The first Vanderbilt coach to beat Tennessee three times in a row since 1926 had fallen on hard times by the 2020 season. The year prior, VU had won just three games, and entering the Missouri game, the Commodores were 0-7.
In a game that saw kicker Sarah Fuller become the first woman to play in a Power Five conference contest, Vanderbilt got crushed by the Tigers. Missouri dominated the matchup at Faurot Field, winning 41-0.
Mason put the blame for the loss on his own shoulders after the game. The next day, he was fired.
Mason finished his Vanderbilt career with a 27-55 record.
"This was a difficult decision, but I know this change is necessary," Candice Storey Lee, VU's athletic director, said in announcing the firing. "We wish Derek and his entire family the best."
Mason has another connection to Saturday’s game against Auburn, having served as Harsin’s defensive coordinator in 2021 before moving to the same job at Oklahoma State during the offseason. He remains at that position in Stillwater.
Butch Jones
The Butch Jones era at Tennessee had so much promise early on. Jones took the Tennessee job for the 2013 season fresh off a successful tenure at Cincinnati, where he won two Big East championships.
His recruiting early on energized the fan base in Knoxville. The successes came to a head in 2016, when the Volunteers played well early in the season, winning thrillers against Florida and Georgia.
Unfortunately for Jones, after a late-season run that included losses to Vanderbilt and South Carolina, Tennessee’s run of optimism was over. The Volunteers finished that season 9-4 and ended the campaign with a win over Nebraska in the Music City Bowl.
Despite his Volunteers not winning any actual championships, Jones did attempt to claim one for his senior class that year, making a comment that many would consider ill-advised given the climate of Tennessee’s fan base.
“When we talked about winning championships, they’re a champion,” Jones said. “They’ve won the biggest championship — and that’s the championship of life."
The next year, things went downhill precipitously. After landing a lackluster recruiting class by Tennessee standards, Jones gave another foot-in-mouth quote about wanting “five-star heart” as opposed to five-star players.
Then, the Volunteers started losing. They were 0-5 in the SEC when they rolled into Faurot Field to play Missouri.
The Barry Odom-led Tigers poured it on, absolutely skunking Tennessee 50-17, the Volunteers’ worst loss to an unranked school since the advent of the AP poll. The next day, it was over for Jones.
"We really came to a mutual decision about the last couple games," Tennessee's then-athletic director John Currie said at a press conference after the firing, which led to a drama-filled coaching search that ended with Jeremy Pruitt leading the Volunteers. "I believe it's the right decision for all concerned."
Following his firing, Jones went to Alabama, remaining in the Nick Saban School for Wayward Coaches through the 2020 season. He is now in his second season as the head coach at Arkansas State.
Bret Bielema
Bielema didn’t take over the Arkansas job in enviable circumstances. After leaving Wisconsin with seven consecutive winning seasons, he took over in Fayetteville for John L. Smith, who spent one year as the Razorbacks’ coach following the rapid and salacious departure of Bobby Petrino.
He took control of a team with most of its talent depleted and struggled to a 3-9 record in his first season at Arkansas. After that, things started to pick up and the Razorbacks went 7-6 in 2014, finishing the season with a win in the Texas Bowl.
The next year things were even better. The 2015 Razorbacks went 8-5 and beat Kansas State in the Liberty Bowl.
Unfortunately for Bielema, this isn’t a story about coaches taking over woebegone programs and leading them to any sustained success. His fourth season in charge of Arkansas arrived with high expectations and it failed to meet them.
The 2016 team went 7-6, losing the Belk Bowl, but the 2017 team was when the regression really started to show. Before the Missouri game, the Razorbacks were only 1-6 against SEC competition.
When the Tigers came to Fayetteville in late November, it made for a nail-biter. The game featured five lead changes and MU was down by 14 points twice in the first half.
With five seconds left, Tucker McCann kicked a 19-yard field goal to win it for Missouri. Before he could even get off the field, Bielema was fired, becoming the second casualty of the 2017 Tigers.
"Never let go in my entire life, so this is a first for me," Bielema said from the podium after the game. "I've had a lot of coaches say, whether it's right, wrong or different, you want to leave the place better than when you got here, and I know that's happened."
After losing that job, he spent three seasons in the NFL, first with the New England Patriots, then the New York Giants. Before the 2021 season, Bielema took the head coaching job at Illinois, where he went 5-7 last season and remains.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Missouri football: 4 SEC coaches fired after losing
