FSU fans see standing drop in Fandom 250 ranking for 2018

FSU saw their ranking plummet in the latest poll from FanSided, thanks in part to how the football team suffered their first losing season since 1976.

If you are a fan of the FSU sports teams in 2018, it has been quite and up and down ride for you. While the Seminoles won national titles in softball and women’s soccer along with the basketball team making it to the Elite Eight, the baseball team got swept right out of the NCAA tournament and we all saw what just took place with the Noles on the football field.

Throughout the course of the season, you could see that the crowds would become less and less when the FSU football team was playing at home – a combination of factors including the poor performance on the field and things off the field like Hurricane Michael devastating the panhandle like Irma did last year for the southern part of the state.

The perceived lack of “fandom” was apparent to everyone across the country, including our friends here at FanSided – who ranked FSU as the 186th best fan base in their Fandom 250 rankings for this year, down 47 spots from last season.

"Losing iconic Bobby Bowden’s replacement in Jimbo Fisher to the Texas A&M job wasn’t going to sit well with the ‘Noles. Sure, Taggart is best known for coaching the South Florida Bulls in Tampa, but this is an ACC blue-blood program on the fritz he’s inherited."

First off, it wasn’t the former coach leaving that didn’t sit well – it was how he left that made many in the FSU family upset. Second of all, were the Seminoles really on the fritz after having five straight double digit win seasons before 2017?

"Florida State fans are very passionate but don’t always handle losing well."

That might be the best compliment that FSU could be paid. I don’t want to be a part of a program that is accepting of losing. I want a group that doesn’t deal with the first losing football season since 1976 well.

"In essence, Florida State has to accept that this is a rebuilding year for the football program. If the fan base can’t get its head around that, it could negatively impact them in future Fandom 250 rankings."

FSU fans accepted a long time ago that this season wasn’t going to end with a spot in the College Football Playoff, so our heads have been around it for a while.

I think one of the misconceptions is that FSU is only about football – this is a program that supports all the programs, from tennis to volleyball, and will sometimes even blindly have their back no matter what (i.e. that FSU Twitter group that people love to hate on).

It’s also a fan base that has been hurt by things they can’t control – like families losing everything in the recent storms that have struck the state that kept fans from being able to come to games considering how many fans and alumni are more than four hours away in places like Orlando, Tampa and Miami.

On the positive side, the rankings put FSU ahead of Miami (No. 21 in colleges, No. 198 overall) – but on the negative side it has the Seminoles behind Florida (No. 18 in colleges, No. 127 overall).