FSU Football: Willie Taggart emphasizes need to recruit South Florida

FSU football has always had success in recruiting the fertile grounds of Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach – and the new coach wants it to continue.

For much of the last four decades, not long after FSU football brought in Bobby Bowden came in as the head coach, the Seminoles made an emphasis of recruiting the top players in the ti-county area in the southeast part of the state that may be the best group of talent in the entire country.

Since then, the Noles have made it a yearly thing to bring in the best players from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties to wear the garnet and gold – being the only school that was able to successful do so against the Miami Hurricanes when they were a revenant program decades ago.

While the numbers have gone down in the later years of the last head coach, FSU football knows that if it wants to keep winning that the pipeline up the Florida’s Turnpike and across I-10 must continue for decades to come.

During a stop in Miami for an annual booster event, head coach Willie Taggart made it clear to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that FSU football will continue to have a presence in the area – both for the fans and alumni that are throughout the three counties as well as the hundreds of recruits that Taggart would love to have in Tallahassee for years to come.

"“I think every school in the country comes down here to recruit. They understand how fertile the recruiting base is here. If you look at us in the past, we’ve had a lot of success with student-athletes from down here. They had great success at [Florida State], too. It’s always important be down here and be seen and be known.”"

Names in FSU football history like Marvin Jones, Devin Bush, Danny McManus and hundreds more have been joined in recent years by stars named Devonta Freeman, Kelvin Benjamin, Dalvin Cook, Stanford Samuels III and even the man who started at quarterback last season, James Blackman.

In the #Tribe18 recruiting class, the Seminoles brought just one player in from the area when they signed cornerback Asante Samuel Jr. from Fort Lauderdale powerhouse program St. Thomas Aquinas. While FSU football can recruit the entire country and state of Florida as a household name, they can NEVER ignore maybe the most talented area in the country.

Next: Willie Taggart sits down for interview with Chop Chat

Taggart recruited South Florida heavily during his time as coach at USF – now, it appears that the same drive to bring in players from the 305, 954 and the 561 to the FSU football program is in place.