Leadership Issues Could Plague 2015 FSU

The 2015 FSU team could face some serious leadership concerns without a single senior under scholarship on offense.

One of Jimbo Fisher’s most common refrains when asked about leadership is that there’s no age limit– anyone can lead.

That’s going to get seriously tested next season.

As of right now — barring what looks to be an increasingly unlikely transfer by Braxton Miller to FSU — the Seminoles will enter next year with plenty of leadership questions on offense.

Heck, even if Miller does transfer (he told Ohio State fans at the team’s National Title celebration that they had another year together), there’s no guarantee that he would be able to win over the locker-room and become a team leader in the course of just a single Summer.

Either way, FSU will enter next season with a new quarterback, an almost entirely new offensive line and a group of skill players that won’t have a single senior on the two-deep depth chart. In fact, on the entire offense FSU won’t have a single senior on scholarship.

In fact, on the entire offense FSU won’t have a single senior on scholarship.

It’s actually an exciting problem to have. It means FSU is built for another run in 2016 when its offense will be comprised mostly of juniors and seniors. But in terms of 2015– it could prove fatal.

While FSU’s defense will have guys like Nile Lawrence-Stample, Derrick Mitchell, Reggie Northrup, Terrance Smith and Tyler Hunter to provide senior leadership (not to mention juniors like Jalen Ramsey and Nate Andrews), there’s no obvious source of leadership on offense right now.

Sean Maguire seems to have the inside track on the starting job next season– though it’s possible someone else could push him for it over the course of the Spring and Summer — and he will likely be under the most pressure to lead.

Beyond Maguire, RB Mario Pender and FB Freddie Stevenson will both be juniors in the backfield. And WR’s Bobo Wilson and Kermit Whitfield will be juniors in the receiving corps. Kareem Are and Chad Mavety — both Juco transfers who redshirted in 2014 — will be redshirt juniors on the offensive line.

Still, that group of juniors is hardly the most experienced. Maguire has started one game and played in garbage time during several others. Pender has been around three years but has only played parts of one season. Stevenson got his first experience last year when he replaced Chad Abram. Both Wilson and Whitfield have two years of experience under their belts — and Wilson has actually started — but neither has been a model of consistency early on in their careers. Isaiah Jones, a redshirt sophomore, was ineligible last season.

And in all likelihood, the group of players that will start on offense for FSU next year will be even younger. RB Dalvin Cook along with WR’s Travis Rudolph and Ermon Lane all made major impacts last year as true freshman– but none were asked to lead.

Contributing and leading are two much different concepts.

And then there’s the offensive line. True freshman Roderick Johnson was a revelation at left tackle last season and Ryan Hoefeld got a taste at center for a couple of games. But that’s it. FSU returns just 10 career starts amongst its returning offensive linemen in 2015. That means guys like Wilson Bell, Are and potentially Mavety will all be making their first career starts this September.

Top to bottom, the 2015 FSU offense is going to be highly inexperienced and — at least at first — without an obvious leader.

That’s been a problem before, too. It was last year.

It wasn’t exactly a secret that FSU wasn’t as hungry last season as it had been in 2013. A large part of that stemmed from that fact that the seniors on the 2013 team had seen FSU when it was down. They had been through the difficult times when the Seminoles were still trying to prove that they were back– that they were relevant.

Last year, the hunger had started to fade. You saw it mostly on the defensive side of the ball.

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The year before, guys like Terrence Brooks and Telvin Smith made sure that players were putting in the work at practice and off the field. Voluntary workouts weren’t voluntary, they were mandatory. And it was the seniors who served as an extension of Jimbo Fisher himself– demanding that the young guys live up to the program’s expectations.

Last year, those voluntary workouts — the time spent after practice, the extra film study, the extra emphasis on conditioning in the off-season — were voluntary again. Jalen Ramsey said as much after the very first game in Dallas. Without an abundance of seniors to keep the young guys in line the attendance at those “voluntary workouts” started to fall off, the hunger wasn’t the same.

You saw the results on the field.

That will continue on offense this year unless somebody can step up and fill the void left behind by players like Jameis Winston, Rashad Greene and Cameron Erving.

The 2015 Seminoles — especially on offense — are going to be a very young team. Most of the guys on this roster have lost just one game in their entire career. Three games at most. Most of these guys have never had to grind to get to the top.

FSU was already there when they got here.

Complacency could be a major problem next year. And with a three week stretch in the middle of the season that will have FSU hosting Miami and Louisville (who will be coming off a bye week) before facing Georgia Tech’s triple-option on the road in Atlanta– it’s going to be more important than ever that those leaders step up early.

Otherwise 2015 could be a very tough year.

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