HOOVER — Dan Mullen pretended to be Twitter-savvy when he stepped behind the dais Wednesday, but there was no way to keep up with the new Mississippi State coach 140 characters at a time.

Mullen spoke fast and at length about the excitement surrounding the dawn of a new era in Starkville at the first of three SEC Media Days at the Wynfrey Hotel. He needed 15 minutes to get conceivably everything that’s happened since he was named Sylvester Croom’s successor out of his system before he fielded a single question.

“I heard some people say the easy way out of this room would be to stand up here, prepare a 60 minute speech,” said Mullen, who, along with all the SEC coaches that take the stage this week, is allotted 40 minutes at the podium.

“There’s some different things about our program we have going.”

The biggest, of course, is Mullen, who spent the bulk of his time Wednesday talking about himself and his time spent under Urban Meyer at Bowling Green, Utah and Florida.

Since he served as a graduate assistant under Paul Pasqualoni at Syracuse, Mullen, 38, said he’s kept a big notebook filled with things he would do and wouldn’t do as a head coach. He’s had no trouble filling those pages with “do’s” since he joined Meyer at Bowling Green as the Falcons’ quarterbacks coach.

His focus has centered on the attitude his rebuilding team has attacked the offseason with, as it hopes to rebound from an unexpected 4-8 2008 season.

“You win a lot of football games at 5:45 in the morning Wednesday in February,” Mullen said. “There’s obviously a lot of similarities because (Meyer) and I had a lot of similar beliefs for the years we spent together and there will be a lot of similarities between our program and the programs that he’s done at Bowling Green, Florida, and Utah.”

That’s not the only thing Mullen brought with him to Starkville.

That fast-paced spread offense he directed at Florida, which paced the Gators to national championships in 2006 and 2008, is in the installation stage with the previously offensively anemic Bulldogs.

Mississippi State ranked last in both total offense and scoring offense among SEC teams in 2008 and was nearly dead last in both categories nationally. Even when the Bulldogs’ strong defense limited Auburn to 3 points last season, they still didn’t have enough offense to get over the hump.

The fact that the Bulldogs’ first-team offense scored points in this year’s spring game, which was viewed by a record 31,606 fans, was seen as a major step forward.

“It kind of made me happy,” junior linebacker K.J. Wright said, “because you see that we’ve got potential to be good.”

Mullen has yet to pick a starting quarterback heading into his team’s season opener against Jackson State. The odds-on favorite, returning starter Tyson Lee, ran the spread in high school.

“That position is not really about how you throw, how you run, those things, it’s about the leadership and the demeanor that you present, how you manage your team into victories,” Mullen said. “That team is going to take on a lot of personality of that quarterback of how they play.”

Mullen was quick to acknowledge he was a bit spoiled having one of the best quarterbacks in college football history under his watch the past three seasons in Florida.

His admiration for Tim Tebow was still apparent Wednesday, when Mullen choked up momentarily when discussing the all-everything quarterback.

“He taught me a very valuable lesson in life: if you can make an impact on someone’s life, it’s your obligation to do that,” Mullen said. “And he is one of the most amazing young people out there.”

That’s not to say Tebow-speak has infiltrated his messages to a Bulldog team that will likely receive bottom billing among preseason prognosticators.

“He knows that we’re a different team and we have a different mindset and we have a different swagger about us because we are Mississippi State,” junior offensive tackle Derek Sherrod said. “That’s the only style of football we know how to play.”

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